The march from Shropshire to the Somme, how long?
At least two hundred years of industry and revolution,
while time twists like country lanes, till distance shortens
to a sniper’s bullet. I am back a hundred years myself,
with a music mag found on a Yorkshire market stall.
The sun is early, hot and kind upon the morning,
and A Shropshire Lad is playing.  A call of peace and youth,
of promise. A world where wealth and industry
brings longer lives and hopes and opportunities,
where steam and speed connect. George Butterworth,
its son. His father manages the LNER. He goes
to Oxford where dreamy academe invents
a past of fragrant summers, kings of chivalry
and perfect love; where folksy melodies are revived
as their words and harmonies are lost in city
smoke. George does more than this – he rescues
from uncertainty and doubt, Vaughan Williams.
Makes him write his London Symphony – even
reinventing it when a German publisher loses
it on the very eve of war. What service to us all.

A bugle call away from dark, where no light falls,
where men’s names wait for carving on memorials,
and here is Butterworth, his early works torn up
lest he should not return, and they are unrevised.
A year in uniform, defending what he heard and sang
against the threat of Beethoven and Brahms,
of Uber Alles. Stands in a trench in France, he and his men
have dug, have named for him, and does not
hear the bullet coming, coming, coming.

They bury him where he falls, in his trench’s wall.
No time for service, or an anthem played. His body’s
never found, no last post played, lost like
so many dreamy lads. A pointless stinking strip
of charnel ground. Somewhere else a plaque or two recalls
his sweet-for-summer name, his Military Cross
adorns a wall. His music, rare and lovely,
plays across a car park as I wait. So many things
to honour. Thank you, George, for leaving some
to promise more than sweetness, tears.

Lines near Westminster Bridge

Two men of bronze, in diagonal corners.
Between them, earth, bared of grass
from the late queen’s funeral crowd;
or a protest army; or tourists ebbing
towards white stone, scraped clean
of grime, or blood. Churchill: close to
the House he charmed with lisping growls,
a stubborn lurch with stick, and faltering
reputation bubbling. His back, hunched
as if Plantagenet unhorsed, is turned away.
And then Mandela: arms outstretched, smiling,
reaching for different futures from the possible.
His rainbow land retreats from promises.

Words, their stock in trade, unheard
against the hum and strain of traffic
snarled at lights. More statues strike
claims to gratitude, each gathering in
their places, the tyrannies enriched
and buried in our past. Ghandi, dhotied,
his bike-wheel specs focusing
on poverty and renunciation. India, unfettered,
makes way through butchery and murder.
Smuts, our boyhood nickname for a Smith
of any kind, conjoining empire and war.
And on through Empire’s fine etcetras.

And then behind the fence, protecting myths
from all us passers-by, two men in uniform
discuss the weather, to by-pass time.
White copper, and an Asian guy
from some private army, they laugh
and gossip, making up for history’s old
stones, and a new future in the sun.

London, September 2022

Don’t all good things appear in threes?
Lists, Christian deities, oils to ease
the rusted bolt? In Rome they broke the mould,
abandoning the triumvirs to confer state power
twice – on Caesar, then Octavian. Much good
it did them, for a while. Better those old Greeks
with three great rivers in Epirus: the Styx
whose waters plunged the gates of hell;
grim Kokytos, river of Lamentation;
and Pyriphlegithon, which flowed Flaming Fire.
They met at Acheron, and hereabouts you paid
the ferryman his fare, and crossed the lake to death.

No worries then. Today we come as Greeks
on holiday from all of that. In Parga, twelve
licensed cabs run pleasure seekers to their heavens.
filling beaches, bays, and boat decks, slowly turning
in the sun like peanuts roasting. We shelter vainly
from its basting fire in books, conduct an aimless
quest for memories with our mobile phones.
Or we can cruise the mythic waters, and bathe
like starfish in its azure deeps. Pleasure cruisers
nip like sharks about our heads. At night we cross
into a dazy sleep of comfort, sacrificed with cheeses,
meats and fishes, taken there by cocktails,
wines and brandy – forgetting Charon’s charges,
his calls upon our cares and bank accounts.