A Plea

Please don’t nail my testicles to the table,

It’s’s a valuable table and I prize it.

It’s rosewood, 1820 , deep red brown with grain of sable,

And it’s English too, so please do not despise it.

Of course the Regent did admire the Napoleonic style,

So it has a graceful French look about it,

And of course you know, I too, am a mad keen Francophile,

It’s not my balls I care about, don’t doubt it. 

Inspired by this section of an article in The Spectator by Rory Sutherland:

Remainers have almost exclusively made their case on economic grounds, yet in a manner far more fanatical than the businesses they claim to defend. One of the strangest aspects of the Brexit debate is how readily people on the left adopt neo-liberal beliefs about free trade when it supports their emotional predisposition. This may explain why such people have won so few converts; after all, it doesn’t sound convincing to hear leftists suddenly profess passionate concern for global supply-chains. Theirs is an emotional fear disguised as an economic argument; a bit like saying: ‘Please don’t nail my testicles to the table, it’s a very valuable table.’

You can’t help but think: ‘That isn’t your real reason, is it? 

“The Haste of the Fool is the Slowest Thing in the World. “

The slowest thing in the world is the haste of the fool,

Who seeks to undermine that which over years

Has been held fast, because it is a good.

He rushes through his Bills and seeks to rule

A people whom he holds in deep contempt,

And cannot bear the fact he shares their race,

Dispensing with their wishes in distaste

He makes them criminal by passing acts.

Because he is a fool he moves in haste

And sees the nation through his weak, myopic lenses

A poor, distorted, wishy washy place

Where principle and moral have no force,

Revealing he has nothing understood

And ultimately cannot stay the course.

And other fools, whipped up into like frenzies,

Craving power in their ignorant greed,

Champion his folly as they school

Their minds in shallow, thin and meaningless ideas,

Believing they are radical, in contradiction

To the definition of the word, for who needs facts?

That which Orwell had predicted but thought fiction

Has come about through this crazèd, foolish speed

This ‘rational’, ‘liberal’ shallow intervention

Has sought to lay a once great nation waste. 

But a fool’s haste is the slowest thing there is

And a country knows its stories and its fate

And writes its history in terms of people,

And fools, by definition, learn too late

Their folly, viz:

Movements borne of popular dissent

Are never crushed by those who legislate. 

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All arseholes and eyeballs, and beyond belief.

Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral.

There’s no purifying fire, though it’s source, the sun

blazes, somewhere, out of sight,

just purifying light.

The blue above the Fens, Prussian, lapis lazuli, azure,

scattered in the atmosphere, 

contrasting with the grey-gold-white

of limestone lamella, hymenophore,

pours through plain panes, making things clear.

The stone crowd, once gathered in niches, is no more.

There’s only Modern Mary, plump in pleated  gown,

as if months have passed since she conceived,

arms raised to Heaven, eyes down.

And only a few living souls stand, stunned,

gazing in awe,

struck, not by stained, chromatic decoration,

but by destruction, desecration, 

which yet seems cure,

a counterintuitive restoration,

not just of faith in God,

but in the superior skills and determination, 

of men who believed,

though so much of what they achieved

is no longer there.

Now there is only clarity
what is left, laid bare,

peace, calm

flooding through each warped, transparent plane,
creating here and there a lens,

Magnificat Dominum

pouring through

this ‘Ship of the Fens’
this miracle of the warp-land plain,

this place, whose space was ever pure,

so that we’re bathed by balm 

the grace that spills across each embrasure.

After Reading an Article in the Middle of the Night About Dr Seuss, and how to Pronounce His Name.

It is too late, it is no use,

I keep on saying Dr Seuss,

I read your words and hear my voice

And find I simply have no choice,

However much I wish to say

His name the proper German way,

My silly brain will not refrain

From mispronouncing it again. 

It is too late

I have no choice

I simply can’t say Dr Seuss. 

Paving Over the Cow Paths

Meandering at random in pursuit

Of more of what was sought before and loved,

Does not seem a bad way to make a route.

But fixing these in stone is plainly mad

And a pointless contradiction in terms.

And yet I don’t rejoice, I don’t feel glad,

When cogitating the alternative,

Because I know that those who’d 'pave the way'

And lead their followers to  pastures new,

Are prone to lead the gullible astray.

And worse than a tarred cow path is a road

Paved with good intentions, ill thought through.

Bells on Sunday

The ringing isle, that Handel named

still rings, despite the lack of faith,

of those who dwell within the bounds

of steeple and sky piercing spires.  

They hear,

above the daily grind, 

despite white headphones in each ear,

and dreary ‘music’ banging.

And when the peals are rightly famed

for purity of dinging sounds

and clarity of singing chimes, 

they feel, quite rightly, that they own

this tintinnabulation tone,

this lovely clinging clanging.

Bonging, tenor rhymes

re echo

from marvellous medieval towers

on and on and on they go,

inside the mind

and give the sense this noise is ours.

And how much greater pride we feel,

when ‘our’ bells’ seem to appeal

to those who choose which shall appear

on Sunday morning radio.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08fdfm6