Hidden God

       
         Lithograph: Durham Cathedral

The cathedral is always above

their heads, squat on the scarp,

foundations a platform of smoke,

clutter above the sinking lane

where a chimney-sweep turns to the inn,

a miner in this small city of bends

and stacks and black soot clogging.                               

Down at the turn, a churchman,

smirking, strolls with his cane,

his wife with kerchief to face,

upright as trees

on the rise behind,

a slant of morning between them.

Out in the churned land,

jigs and rigging riddle the fields,

dark folds piling

for heavers who stumble,

ants on the mound

where the pits’ gain’s tipped

and the brakes clump,

dirt on the wheels in the sludge

and mush of it back to the burning,

the sheer bluff blind at its corner,

his gaiters protecting

the pick of her pattens

in the dearth of the smudged sun’s shaft.

The way down to cobbles continues to kilter,

the usual cart, all falter and lumber,

a goad over the horse.

Hard and Soft

 

For R.G.J.

An hour before he’d slept through the service

where song had swelled in tune with the sea,

which moved, as his blood once had,

to soften the outline of stone into shape

though its core was as old and canny as earth.

Rain battered rhythmically inland.

At the back end of a winter’s day

when the sun pitched dark in a Welsh sea,

the chimney did what he’d hoped it would;

puffed dust from the chapel onto the wind,

shared him over known and steady valleys.  

Grandma’s Wool Basket

 

Times of choice

and each was not a lead

she should have tried.

All ties bound

hope to weakness

before she followed

one whose touch

unravelled in wounds,

no strength in death,

but design.

I stay, picking and picking

at threads in a fading skein.

Queen Street, 1990

Ending a passage thrumming with shadow,

totems of dynasties cracked to oblivion,

they power with figures cut
clear by knock and gouge.

Typed words before - Class I, Class II,

Class III. Provenance founders
on order adrift; snakes crook

near mirrors, rings clot

over slipped moons, hooded riders

clump on horseback. They gather;

an old alliance of symbol and silence,

confused in the half-light here.

I stretch for fullness under my hand,

find their defeat in fibre-glass,

a real few stacked beyond my reach.

Back at the house, they meet by walls

corrupt of mortar; block totters on black.

You scrape away the past year's leaves;

nipped grass breaks under the rake.

"I thought you'd gone back home."

The stones are dethroned

as each word chisels the air
between us. Shattered now,
what's dead stands dumb.

Brexit Mayhem

I’ve never yet blogged here about UK politics, but the country is now at a historical turning point and that needs to be logged and dated. As for politics and the duplicitous minority party of Tory aliens who are behind the current debacle, I daren’t, in detail, get started because I’d never finish – from its lies, deception, the use of Goebbels-type propaganda, distraction techniques, secrecy, proven illegality, the deliberate and incendiary whipping-up of class, race and xenophobic rhetoric, corruption, constitutional mayhem, subversion of democracy, instituting a classic civil war scenario, to say nothing of the continuing destruction of the economic, business, social and cultural infrastructures of the country.

I’ve been in politics all my life, from being born into a Socialist household in the middle of WW2, through teaching politics and political theory to being active in the field, and have never seen anything so structurally damaging as what’s been happening since Cameron took office and what he did with his ‘party first’ Brexit referendum; and, believe me, I've seen some in my longish life, including the ruinous Thatcherite years. BoJ and the present glut of Tories in power might as well be on Mars, so divorced are they from the damage their ‘me first’ policies and ideology have caused. We are now rapidly descending into being a banana republic, though, this week, the would-be despot’s shtick has been lopped a little by the Supreme Court. Mind, if the branch is so rotten, there’s often a need to take an axe to the tree and destroy its root.

And now we have this oafish goon, Johnson, who refuses to apologise over his remarks about the murdered Jo Cox, murdered as a direct result of his, the ERG’s and Farage’s inflammatory rhetoric used in the Brexit referendum campaign, as well as refusing to apologise to people, Queen and Parliament over illegally proroguing Parliament. How anyone can say that there’s an intelligence that cares for ordinary people and their needs behind his buffoonish exterior, I can’t imagine. All we get is bluster, bullying and the dodging of questions, certainly no considered policy statements or even Brexit statements so far, together with which he’s shown that he hasn’t the common decency and manners of a plague-ridden rattus rattus, let alone a human being.

On top of that, he now has the temerity, after all the damage he and the Tories have done since 2010, to attempt to electioneer on the basis that he’s a supporter of the people and that any group or party opposing the Tories is to be seen as the inferior part of his ‘people v. the elite’ campaign - utterly spurious populist nonsense, of course. Tribune of the people? How dare he!

This is the bumptious boor who was born to privilege and has taken advantage of what that has offered throughout his corrupt and corrupting life. This was the crass fool who deliberately drove 21 MPs out of his own party, leaving the Tories as a minority government, but one that is now hard core ultra-right. This is the shyster who, backed by the psychopathic Cummings, tried to drive the prorogation railroad through Parliamentary procedure and the Constitution only for it to be stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling that his act was illegal. This is the political clown who has succeeded in uniting opposition parties to the extent that, to date, he hasn’t had one of his Parliamentary motions passed through the House since he took office. This is the little tin god who can't even get a presentable Brexit policy together and is making every effort not to have one. How any ordinary voter can still support the man and not see what he and the current Tory Party truly are – tyrannical, fascistic, without humanity or scruple – is beyond me as much as it’s beyond rationality and reality.

Worse, there's a deliberate madness to the rhetoric now being used. It's about BoJ/Cummings investing in it to the extent that there could be more murders and riots on the streets. They'd then exploit that to a) whip up more division in the country by using further rhetoric along the lines of "if you want the rioting, etc., to stop, get a no-Brexit deal through the HoC," as Cummings more or less blackmailingly indicated yesterday, and b) to invest even more in the monstrous pre-election gobshite of the 'people v. the elite' in order to influence the election's outcome.  What they're doing is attempting to create a violent reality in order to force through their aims; it's pure Goebbels-type psychological manipulation.

We saw these same tactics used 80-odd years ago by the Nazis in their sweep to power. It's terrifying to see them used now by hardline no-dealers. More terrifying is that too many ordinary people haven't seen through this and dismiss it as fear-mongering, then revert to emotion-laden opinion based on the lies and soundbites they've been fed. There's nothing that BoJ/Cummings won't stoop to in order to gain their ends.

And people still say that democracy hasn’t been hi-jacked and that the British people are not governed by a despotic system constituting PM and Cabinet? Yeah, right! In fact, it's about as far right as you can get short of outright Nazism.

More on this
 

Abutment

 

Peonies burst from the border,
red shot on the wind
flung up to a downing sky.

These are the flowers beside your bed.
They’ve been dropping since morning, the petals,
clotting the wood while your breathing slows. 

Arthur’s Seat

 

You climb. I slip whole.

The grass bloodies,

crows crack overhead.

It’s too late for more, you say.

The loch’s wide water

blackens behind us.

Time to go back.

Tracked over peaks

the last crow dips,

flicks into silence.