U: In amongst these red corridors
By dgl
- 720 reads
I
They can not see beauty as they
Dwell in sodden
Red terraced row hell.
On this Jerusalem's West Bank.
Beyond the walls.
They don't have that far sight to reach
Past television
And into the light.
If the feet in times gone walked
Over leaving
Dimples from the nail holes, they now
Are long since gone.
Only the holes themselves remain.
The rain red brick
Bloody rain. It washes the walls
Eroding holes
Further etching gum-
Spangled slabs. In all this blood red
We are distanced
From green, save the parks.
Hanging gardens, hanging on while
Life lies buried
In fossil tar pits
A carpeted land of black and white
Rolls. Did those wheels
Roll in ancient times?
Or has Armageddon now come
To cull the Jews?
So ruddy Hades bleeding walls.
Descends Orpheus,
A product of slump.
The decaying grandeur of wealth
Collapsed.
Though decadence is alive and well
But suffering the clap.
An empire fell
Modelled on Rome.
The blood that built it has now gone.
The blood remains
As an effigy
Rolling down the walls. The red walls
This dreary day.
As I walk this day
An ugly sense of futile dread
For a future
Dead, already dead.
In amongst these red corridors.
Carpeted black
With broken white guides
Like litter down it's length. I look.
There in the red
I can see a fox,
Timid, gentle fleeing afraid
As the hounds chase.
A powerless fox.
By its nature, it has itself undone.
Waiting
As the pack comes
To tear apart its very being.
I see the bricks
An animal spayed
Left impotent. Spayed by its own
Sharp teeth as though
An accident when
Cleansing itself. And yet I see
A bright grey ray
In the sky. Stabbing
Through the darkness with all its might.
What small quanta
Light winter affords
This dull divided land, where cramped
Squalor and tilled
Space are hand in hand.
But the arms are long. They stretch
Across roundabouts,
Motorway junctions
More than a walk away. Away.
Once there were fields
Now there are verges
Edged with grey curb stones that all melt
Into the black.
A pot is boiling
Stewing to blandness textureless
Culture of cool.
II
Amongst these red corridors
I see the Gods
Gods of the ancients
Only in puzzles in papers
Old pretensions.
The classical aspirations
Destroyed a globe.
Tearing lands apart
Not the clean edged single cut
Alexander
Favoured when he rent
The Gordion knot for access.
In the mortar
I see frayed ends
Of the rope. Untidy, ugly
Stolen riches
Have disappeared here.
Now as I look at the red brick
I wonder why,
What was it all for?
I dwell in the land of the Gall
My home no more
My home, no welcome
Would await me there at all.
Too anglicised
For Gael, too Gaelic
For the people under the siege
Of their dreaming.
In barb wire I see the chickens
Prey to the fox.
The sly cunning wiles
That leads its dupe one way before
It snaps its jaws
And white feathers fly
Like clouds in the overcast grey sky.
Fog bound future
Befuddled reason.
A broken history divides side
From side. Peace walls
Partition a land.
In amongst those Red corridors
There are small wars
Fought daily in hand-
To-hand combat. Swearing, spitting
And throwing stones
Like children at play
But they are playing at combat
And their children
Just get in the way.
In amongst the red corridors
Lurk modern gods
Pagan Christians
As if Crom cruach lying dead
Gave up its ghost
To sleep an age
Then rise again for more bloodshed
A sceptred Isle
Smashed about the face
With nail spiked sticks or the orange
Order's civic
Mace. Symbolic of
Toytown councillors playing games
Monopoly
In duplicity.
Where amongst these red corridors
Has cricket gone?
And was it ever there?
If those feet walked over this ground
They must have trudged
Away despondent
To suffer slow protracted death.
Tortures beyond
Imagination
Were deemed to be better than this.
What happy breed
Their sad red walls bleed
On a rainy day in England
Let us look back
Was it always black?
Wordsworth found daffodils on hills
And dales, golden.
'Green and pleasant land'
So spake the words of Blake's great song
So what went wrong?
III
Bastard culture Angle and Dane
That took Rome
And Greece as it's Gods
In the manner of the fascists
It sought to crush.
The new Roman's, the modern Huns.
And later here
We saw the Tiber,
As in classics, foaming with blood.
And it persists
The liberalists
Of contemporary verse
Ignore their genes
The cradle of law
And order in this- their own land.
He might have said,
Rushing up the sand,
Veni vidi graffiti on
The future tongue
Of this cold, dark land.
An imperialistic device
To elevate
Classical scholars
Into the highest echelons
Of erudite
Society. Yet,
In amongst these red corridors,
Notions persist
Of nobility.
The red should be emblematic
To those who write
Exalted art today.
Where in Britain are the Britons?
What does Celtic
Reference now evoke?
Apart from Arthur, nothing except
Foreign people
In their own countries.
Taliesyn, Lugh Mac Lir, Fergus
All ancient world
Neglected for Rome.
The more obscure characters now
Get an airing
In English writing
As upstart academics seek
One upmanship
In their quest for Greek.
In amongst the red corridors
I see Brutus
Bleeding Caesar dry
A denial of all that fostered
These two twin Isles
In favour of one.
The Danes first united England:
Viking Cnut;
His Legacy gone.
Surely in the populace this king
Ceding to waves
Breaking the mystique
Is now more widely understood
Than Perseus.
Simplicity
Ought to be the key to modern
Mythology.
Communication
Through evocation of something
That we all know
And don't have to go
To the bookshelves for reference.
Let Beowulf
Be a wolf because
I have no evidence to say
That he is not.
I was never taught
To read the Danish history
In my school days.
This Alien place
That I grew up in hides its past.
Is it the close
Proximity that
Makes the German forebear grotesque?
Distance and time
Breed fondness for Rome.
Familiarity, contempt
For the parent.
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