It's about how the high quality of English wine is a portent of the apocalypse.
(there are certain bits I need to work on. I meant to put it up for my 40th birthday but pretty close ... ps the 4th line is meant to be longer ...)
BROADSTAIRS and CHAPEL DOWN: July 2018
A beach on an isle off an island soon-beached;
Bleak House proud to left, Dunkirk dead ahead.
We, holding out hands for a deal not yet reached
Both switching in a moment between delight and dread,
Pick shells, poke at crabs - she reckless then tearful,
Me patient then tense -, stare out at the sea,
both Britain’s guardian and ever its curse.
She walks, now prescient, sensible, fearful
Looks at the lapping waves then up at me,
Scenting the peril I know’s ten times worse.
“It’s moving” – she suddenly, leg clamp and clam,
Attached by alarm, grasps quickly that tide
Is far more formidable than I ever am.
I said, “Nothing can harm you if you’re with me.”. I lied.
“It’s moving daddy”. She won’t dip her feet
In the gentle siren threat of sea off Kent
Though we do both know we’re safer together,
Half-baking in the broken July heat –
And, lonely voices of confused dissent
Reserve our joy at this un-British weather.
We revel, a little, of course, bewitched
By glistening yachts beyond the crowded sand,
Admire our land which now seems so enriched -
This grand illusion, golden dawn, unearned, unplanned,
Half-drunk among full-drunks, dogs and outliers
Untouched as yet by the baptist suicide,
A statement that, freed from a withering planet,
we’ll starve alone after each deadline expires –
And I, so glumly overwhelmed with pride,
Pick all the scars off this jewel of Thanet.
The first point of fear, invasion, defence,
mission, belief, communion, immersion,
defiantly English in every sense
long past undergoing any further conversion,
its status, its glory perennially won.
We build her first castle – the centre just holds.
The yelp of triumph echoes round the bay,
it firms, served by the same prodigious sun
as roses blooming, wine divine! I fold …
to the wonder of this one summer’s day.
That thirty-odd miles so close and so far,
I make out the ghosts of the rescue flotilla
And swell with the spirit which now serves as our
Priapic, myopic, patriot pilot-slash-killer.
Boats crewed by good-time old boys born again
As military heroes that perilous May day
Set out under siege from Stella Maris
Return with their prize, bullish supermen
Only half-joking as they proudly say they
Should straightway be sent to liberate Paris.
And while the flags of St George still held proud,
Any identity mine for taking,
I’d have sung that dreary anthem wild and loud
If it kept that rarefied summer spell from breaking.
That England - I loved, that wise man’s mixture,
A cute culmination of all they did wrong
When voting for some England they think they knew
Washing the rest of us out of their picture.
And now, in loss, they can take their dull song
Back to the parched land that history outgrew.
And if we sing the Marsellaise, at least
Our child will know she’s European – not
Held down, but scion of the west and the east,
Of unity her birth month so brutally forgot.
She’s joined to two cities, two counties, three
countries, French, Irish, British as she feels.
We’ll sing “Allez les bleus” if the mood takes,
I’ll sell Celtic soul just as surely as she
Will beat the savage hand this era deals
Will storm the Bastille before the storm breaks.
Celebratory spitfires scatter our sky -
She shouts with glee “see you later, airplane,
Love you!”. Our peacetime idyll serves to defy
Despair, all logic and all data scanned in vain
When faced with her joy in our summer garden.
But history recalls, amidst all the spoilers
The sparkling dawn b’fore the darkest hour.
once more, my mind and my heart’s hopes harden
Recalling we’re subject to wasteful, joyless
Demagogue traders’ unquenched lust for power.
Sunburnt, exhausted, defiant, yet still
Clear enough-headed to want to be lost
In the splendour of Kent’s blooming hills
We break from the dismal rigour of counting cost
As the heat dial hits thirty-three, we spy,
In Tenterden, en route to the winery
A gathering of mayors of various places
Gloriously flaunting their small piece of pie
Roasting their lunch off in sweet sozzled finery,
Their bumbling airs enhanced by Three Graces.
The sun’s full force slams the Weald’s rowed slopes,
Once barren, now primed with vines of the south –
The yield and range beyond all wildest hopes,
A weight on the pocket and a gift to the mouth.
I’m sold – the history, the science, the taste.
This is our time, we people of the Downs,
We blessed Cantiaci, we converts-by-line
These grapes have produced, these bottles have graced
The tables and tastebuds of sceptical towns
Who’d have sworn by the Mediterranean wine.
A county reborn as holiday hotspot
Claims champagne chalk from the first (free) degree,
Barely looks back at the home grape’s gut rot
Proclaims itself centralised, unleashed, wholly free.
A country consumed by former glories
Plans the big projects, blocks out the midwives,
Lets in the suckers, the slavers and frackers,
Telling themselves unearthed empire stories
Dizzied, determined on living their best lives
Lost to all gods barring Eris and Bacchus.
The waves are rising to the darkening cliffs.
The shore is moving, we’re a smaller land
Shrinking with each feckless tectonic shift
As the wrecker extends his tiny, oily hand
And we watch in horror as it’s accepted.
I look across one more time to Dunkirk
Where the French army was left to fight and die -
No wonder our grudging requests are rejected
Now, still expecting the old tropes to work
On a union sneered at and slowly bled dry.
This sweet spot, right now, ripe, tanned and ready
For harvest, strawberry red to be picked
Suffering a summer goldrush so heady
That most have forgotten (or stopped caring) they’re tricked
By the knot at the bottom of the flourishing vine
Into thinking we’ve seen the last of the weevil
Who’ll reduce all this beauty to a savage grey season.
Then, if we’ve time, we’ll record the decline
As “The Age Anthropocene Ultaeval” –
That’ll give the last lie to the Age of Reason.
A foolish country now can’t be protected
By any sharp wits or carping voices,
It hardly yet matters which path’s selected –
choices were made long before, we live by those choices.
You’re wise to be wary, my little beauty -
This sea, here, divides and rules as it wills –
There’s so much, I worry, I can’t hold at bay,
Such weight in this one defining duty.
The tide comes in and our feeble moat fills,
But we’re long gone this time, this one summer’s day.
No comments:
Post a Comment