Poetry

Judgement 22

To either side of my path the cosmic dirt,

Which once composed the land, drifted away

And chunks of earth rose so as to depart

Revealing fire and stones. I did not see

Down to the centre of the earth just yet

Where some magnetic core is said to lie.

I worried that my friend would push me in

But that was just my vertigo again.

“The legend of King Arthur was your theme

Or would have been. Tell me what you would have said.”

I put this to him. He replied: “We come

To three or four billions of years backward

And yet my story would be just the same.

How mother country gives her flesh and blood

To her sons and they love their mother land

Like children of a mother to the end.

Their native land gives life to them from birth

It gives them suck and brings them to the air

And they should love her back until their death

And die for her. It is not a metaphor

To say that Britain gave them life and breath

Or that they are alive because of her.

A man should love his self and then his God

And equally his country and his breed.

“He is his land. The greatest crime of all

Is to betray his family and his tribe.

It goes contrary to nature, such betrayal.

Your country is the one who brought you up.

And they are family to you as well

Who saw the light with you and have your shape.

Just as you cannot ever be content

Or be complete and have any descent

“Without a wife, so without home or land

A person is as broken as a stick

Nothing at all. No strength of arm and hand,

Or any heart, unless he comes from stock

Which gave him English words to speak his mind.

She was our mother, and we paid her back

By fighting for the country as her sons

Defending her from foreign influence.

“See treasonous relations with the Pope

And unreal bastard children from abroad

Led us to recognise the threat of rape

From spies and infiltrators full of hate.

But I suspect history came to a stop

Around your time, and with the wrath of God.”

He paused. The sound of mourning filled the skies

Like a woman wailing for her girls and boys.

“Come on,” he said, “What happened at the fall,

To cause the earth to spit us from our graves?

How did we injure God, how did we fail?”

So I said: “Listen how my story proves

You're right.” As I began to tell the tale

The ground was cracking up and down in waves.

I kept hold of his hand and led him on

Saying: “You’ve never heard of Airstrip One?

“That’s what George Orwell called us, in our future,

In times when, as a military base

Or transit camp, or something of that nature,

England became a sort of basket case

And it had morals fitting to its stature.

So, casual procreation, and divorce

Abortion, euthanasia, and such crime

As people do when they have had no home.

“O God, do not let the punishment be too heavy on us.

Our poets, for the time had come for real,

With names from other lands, from other places,

Our very poets aimed to ruin us all,

And squat, or claim that England was racist

When Mr Police Man refused them bail

For stabbings, burglaries, or GBH

Or sang how 'Mistah, "Inglan' is a Bitch"'.

“Where Baldeh turned her back and walked away

On Okolaje squatting on the roof,

Beside a muddy drain pipe. Sir Keir

And Thatcher, Tony Blair, fathered such youf.

Each year end, noticing I was still there,

That I'd survived, did not come as relief.

Things fell apart. So dread grew more and more

With every anti-Christian extra year.

“And this is why, I think, God was aggrieved.

When Covid 19 flu came to our shore

We saw the extent of what we had achieved:

The sons and daughters of England were sure

That staying inside meant that they survived.

They locked themselves down in their total power.

The pinnacle of human civilisation

Global society, black devastation.

“Don’t ask me to inform you of the war

Which followed that and ended all our days.

What I remember of the good back there

Is her insouciant and childish gaze

Her long brown hair. I start to smile for her.

And feel so glad; but for no other cause.

But to my mind, your generation, too,

Must share the blame for universal woe.

“You shut the holy orders of England

And closed the monasteries which used to bind

The earth to heaven, heaven to the ground.

Before that, this was Mary’s holy land

Which St John Cassian saw when he explained

How to sew Sinai and Mt Athos round;

So Benedict and Gregory got to work

And soon we had the Fountains near to York

“And all the hundred others. That was you

Or Cromwell, or a parent close to him.”

I stopped, then. Milton mumbled something low

About simoniacs or nepotism.

And then he raised his eyes as if he could see,

And there a vision from a crazy dream:

Manchester cathedral threw out its towers

Onto a dark field of three thousand stars.

“I know the Feast inside, I smell incense,”

He said. “What is it?” said I. “The Assumption

And inside all the Holy Innocents

Are waiting to grow up and take their station

In heaven with their Maker in the tents

He made for us. Soon he will start to fashion

The new world for the chosen who got through

Who said: ‘Look, mother, I make all things new’.”

We picked the pace up. It was not so far.

And I could see him walk with more purpose.

“You say that God will make the world once more?”

And he: “Already things go well for us.

The world revives, along with King Arthur,

Did you forget our old king never dies?

He always would return in darkest need

To lead the British, rising from the dead.

“Some people should be worried and lament;

Due to eternal life they cannot die.

Now in the parable, the master sent

To gather anyone to his party,

And many came, to face hard punishment,

But some were chosen. Tell me, who are they?

Those few have made it here, like you and I,

Let us go then, to see eternity."