The lone sentinel wasp
who checks this easeful garden table
frisks me daily, but
finding no sweetness
leaves me to the wash and drone of the town,
a pigeon reviews and deprecates
through and through,
his psalmic parallels
interchanging with silence
as I with mine, dissolved
in sunlit greenery,
ruffle of grasses.
Bahrain betrays Palestine,
and other misshapen
lumpen Trumpery
looms out of half-sleep
on my Twitter feed,
and Boris the Covid Butcher bark-barfs
some third rate nonsense
that rife endemic masses lick-spittle up,
bending,
their foul arses lifted to the sky,
for tongues to slobber between their own bovver boots,
sphincters stinking to Aryan heaven
'Bog off!" they snarl at Muslim nurses tending
their foul sores. "Go back to your own country,
you terrorist!"
For Nazism is in fashion,
chthonic forces have decked the Englishman
in fish-scales, blown out beer gut further,
launched abroad, Touretting,
all mean words muttered in private
for long decades handed down, that inner blight,
in Stockholm-syndrome to their Tory masters -
diverting tax-stream from them for state capture
slaying them in their tens of thousands
(a fool and his consciousness easily parted)
who declared Class War on them,
yet still tame the Toonland turkeys - through Goebbels
of Dirty Diggers and skipping Squealers:
'It's all the fault of the fucking foreigner...'
And then to awake
to the garden come back -
and who longs for myth in September sunlight?
No 'Madam-I'm-Adam, no Eva-brick, no Sknekky the
strange serpent-servant-savant - and the wasp's
flown off with the flaming sword.
Only the tree in the wilderness plenary,
mellowing, ripening its mediocre fruit...
all the satisfaction one needs
of a noontide.
................
'And then to awake....' echoes from' Fern Hill' Dylan Thomas.
...................
Doggerel for an Old Dog
Sitting in the garden zone,
quiet on my iron throne,
feeling rather on my own,
do I hear a 'Ding dang dong'?
the 'Rumpty tump' of my bold Gong,
emerging from the old town's song?
And what is that faint 'La te da'?
but the musing Anima,
with another coffee thar,
marvelling at the English trees
and the timbre of the breeze,
light descending at its ease.
And leaf interstices braile
my eyes with some old tale:
Swote the leet that loseth bale.
Skelton nods from another chair;
Wyatt and Surrey discourse there,
avoiding the barbed bramble's tear;
and all those seeds I ever blew,
distant heliopauses strew,
cat's-whisker whisper what is true.
