Slaves

More than 50,000 Carthaginian slaves

built the valley of the temples at Agrigento.

Treadmills and cranes moved the drums

of sandstone which were pegged together, and

the columns fluted and plastered. A coat

of paint, and the soft stone gleamed like marble.

The work of two dozen years, creating eternity.

 

Each temple held the cella of a god –

the classical embodiments of oh so many

precious human qualities. Imagine

worshippers outside, terror-annointed

in the burnished sun, wailing in ecstasy,

hungry for sacrifice – which they could buy

and eat at home. Oh, sacred takeaways.

 

And how awake were these Greeks, and Sicily

their chief disciple, their second home.

Great was their knowledge, their Mathematica.

Philosophers had logic to a T. Morality and sacrifice

their duty, and they loved a hemlock ending.

Dramatists posed the greatest questions,

and knew how to make ‘em laugh like kings.

 

And still those columns standing!

Still declaring for the everlasting things –

how genius rests upon the shoulders of slaves

whose judgments die unspoken in the dust.

And those invisibles, death-worked, fleshless,

likely beaten bones in pits, weep not for

them – for ages greatness grew from their labours.

Being one was the just reward for defeat,

as every Nazi knew. Our miracle that capital

investment, industrial production and the

despoiling of the planet should have put

to death the need for slaves. Progress indeed.

Golden Domes

We reach the frontier and we have to wait,
lined up beside a mile long queue of wrecked and
battered cars, advancing to be scoured for spares.
Another offer to help a neighbour’s fight.

Processed and permitted, our group of time-warn
trucks is hurried under escort to Lviv. We speed
past golden domes and strips of land
hand tended by stooping men and women,
hoeing livings from their soil. Mingled strips of forest,
tillage, grazing horses, cows flicker past. More golden
domes. The roads are scarred with potholes –
unbottomed, unrepaired. Patched, welded, smokey
cars drive on, holding on to Soviet simplicity.

We cross red lights, and cock a snook
at trams which wait for us – in this land at war,
that’s caught in limbo between its would-be
conquerors, and our world of affluence and pensions,
of Payment Plans and Carbon-Friendly Schemes.

Workers’ flats, and jaded concrete workshops
guide us in, then at last the centre and its mediaeval wealth,
it’s untouched harmonies, its cobbled streets, its towers.

That night, ushered to our luxury hotel
by curfew we sleep the night away,
and do not hear the sirens heralding missiles
which fall beyond the city limits and our dreams.

Blucher’s Football

The Hunting Lodge is Marshal Blucher’s,
at 74 a hero of the hour at Waterloo.
Bonaparte flees to a channel port. Arrested,
gains the ultimate security of St Helena.
His conquerors (to give the allied armies
the credit they are due) return to riches,
or impoverishment. It’s a classy business, war.

Blucher is feted. Titles, land, even honours
from a grateful British crown, are heaped.
He retreats to Poland, then another fiefdom
in a disunited land, and this minor palace
where he can pursue an older enemy: the boar.
But not for long. Death quickly follows – a mausoleum
is built, provides a final place rest upon his laurels.

History may pause, only to resume its ironies.
Earlier Napoleon had marched into the jaws of hell,
and smelt Its Russian breath. His first retreat,
the overture to his end. Peace stutters for a century
or more, before the devil, poked, at last comes back
to intervene in yet another war. Red army
soldiers break into the Marshall’s tomb and steal
his European bones. Anticipating sport’s
clashes are the way of things to come,
they use his skull for football as an interlude
upon the march to skewer peace once more.

And here we are. Poland’s free, and sovereign;
prosperity spreads down motorways that split
the darkening forests either side. Great bridges
span the carriageways to give the boar safe passage
beyond the reach of commerce, if not the hunter’s gun.

Old Blucher’s house adjusts itself to life as an hotel.
Outside, two dozen jeeps and four-by-fours
stand waiting, engines clattering, smoke
exhausting in the fresh dawn air, as in 45
T34s vibrated on their bloody tracks.
We are not a regiment of tankers, young
and eager, trembling for a red star flag –
we are assorted farmers, vets, adventurers
and mostly middle-aged or old. The trucks we’re
taking to Ukraine, and one more war
with Russian Armies beating on a distant drum.

Skibbereen

County Cork, 1845

It started here, the famine. A country and a people,
but with absent owners. Families housed in huts
of stone, with just enough to fill their ever-open mouths.
The potato comes – late growing, prolix, wholesome,
Peruvian. It makes their sons grow tall. It’s a solution
to a growing family’s needs. But comes from Mexico,
the Blight. The crops are ruined, hunger feeds
the staring eyes, rents are left unpaid.
The landlords, deaf to pity, shake their heads.

Then comes evictions; roofs and chimneys smashed;
an English Government that blames the victims
for their moral weakness, and believes the market
must be free to prosper her believers. Charities
endow soup kitchens, inventing unnutritious
broths; work schemes pay to break up rocks and
mend the roads for pennies; workhouses overflow.
Half-naked, ragged people crawl the streets,
their pitiful possessions in pawn, and die together
in the gutters. They’re buried coffinless in pits.

Good doctors wring their hands, sketches fill
the Illustrated London News, and, to its credit,
outrage fills the world – if not the hearts of Peel
and his be-whiskered friends. But tens of thousands
die, and Ireland’s emptied fields remain unfarmed.
Ships returning empty to America offer passage
in their holds – and those that do not die at sea
take with them betrayal of their land and hopes.

Today in Skibbereen, a tourist town, points map
where bodies fell; plaques mark the kitchen, gaunt
and empty as a jail. A new-age vegan bookshop
holds a range of old LPs, sells fairtrade coffee,
and a better kind of read; brightly painted bars
draw down the happiness of night; and shoe shops offer
style and comfort as you walk its streets of shame.

P

Meliora Sequimur

Ravilious went to our school. Imagine this.
He breathed its woody polished air; tumbled down
its stairs; lined up outside its masters’ rooms.
Enjoyed the spell of Latin, the pigeons on the roof,
the slap of balls on wood, of hands across the face.

At 12, he was escaping to the Downs, sketching 
Wilmington’s Long Man, and marvelling at stringy 
biplanes that danced the air. At his age, I helped 
weed its painted stones that pretended to be chalk, 
biked everywhere, made kits.  And waited for the trains 
to pass the gates that kept our Hampden Park
from his, but his brush would catch their steamy
progress, creeping from the city to the sea,
the countryside a quilt of grasses, people free.

On his wedding day he smiles.  A home movie
flicks the husband from the man. See him step
outside his watercolour shield.  And there is Tirzah
[really Eileen] a dark-eyed match in art and love.
Biography at last, to replace the misty strokes,
the shades and patterns of his hand, his character.

And here some are. The balanced scenes of bedrooms,
shops of curiosity, trees with winter branches
that lightning-stab the air. And then, as wartime
takes his hand, a frigate’s dazzle sides,
bold brass props a Henry Moore could shape,
a childlike fighter held to ground by storm. 
His appetite for art and war, had brought a commission
and commissions.  Tumbled into uniform, he can pass
above the terror and the pain, to see the shape
of the machine, the curves and angles that bring ends
and endings. Finally, he gets to fly above it all.
He leaves his wife at home recovering [a breast
removed] and, sent to Iceland, joins a rescue flight.

Is never seen again. There’s no sign of wreckage,
bodies or reports – only “missing in action”, which he was not
– and was. It takes a year for wartime Britain
to confirm he’s dead. Tirzah receives no pay
or pension till that day. His loss, and lost support,
becomes her spur. She remarries for one short and final
time. Poor Tirzah, once again abandoned, making more
of her own accomplishment, but also dead quite soon –
the cancer he had fled to Iceland from, coming home.

Even so, the vision that he shaped becomes the way
I see his time, and Sussex where I lived.
He fills lost landscapes with how things might have been,
presents war as not so violent as designed.

Though in his death an emptiness. The usual cry of
promise unfulfilled, of course – but there’s desertion
there as well, the life insisting to be let in to the art.

But still he went to our school. A place of exercises,
ringed caps and ink. He then escaped its rituals
for art. This and none of this we shared, for when I went,
into the Grammar School, he was long dead,
gone into that wartime ocean, passed twenty years.
Though his pictures modestly adorned our corridors
No one thought to mention him to we who followed on.
Art was banished to a stock room, brought out meekly,
once a week, as we strove for better things.