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Last night England perished in my sleep;
Her cry for help was tangled in my dreams.
Smothered by their folds, held baby-like and weak,
I may have stirred but was not woken by her screams.
And when dawn broke with dismal light I woke
To winter’s paean hung upon the barbs of her defeat,
Her wilted rose by blight of bare-faced liars choked,
Her people strangled by their own elite.
From a thousand tiny wounds of small neglects,
The talents of her people frittered all away,
Asset-stripped and sick with tax and debt
Did she expire in slow inglorious decay.
A million lenses framed her agonized demise,
Snapped each and every knife-twist of her pain,
Freeze-framed, re-wound and then in some archive
Each mishap stored from whence reviewed again.
Fine-etched the small components of her death I knew,
Slept through but studied after the event,
In armchair ease with dull detachment viewed,
Like a soap or sitcom scripted for lament.
It seemed to me she got the rough end of the script:
Good people never should be written from the plot,
But the moving tape records and serves its writ:
No rewinds change the truth of it one jot.
Commercial breaks and sitcoms came and went,
Like prosy time-released each to its slot,
But the tape ran on until all life was spent
And just before the end it seems that I dozed off.
But slumber carries with it its own curse,
That he who sleeps is doomed at last to wake
And there the TV waits to tell the worst
Of what he tried to miss but never could escape.
I watched each documented exposé – I did my bit –
That mapped each sorry twist of her decline
And somberly agreed how bad was all of it,
That something should be done while there’s still time.
How dutifully I watched each televised debate
Confirming it was all some governmental wrong
And what could anybody do but wait
For some new messianic nut to come along
And fleece the flock with fey agendum hid
Behind “solutions” that always honest men bear ill,
Who – while he tighter nails our coffin lid –
Sees his coffers and psychotic dreams fulfilled.
I paid my tax and (honest) never broke the law
And drove with care along the middle of the road
And if I could I would have done much more
But the medication then kicked in and so I dozed.
Somehow I missed the better part of this glum tale,
The diagnostic why’s and wherefores of our plight,
Or perhaps we citizens were spared the odd detail
The “who” and “how” kept out of sight
For fear that we might make sense of it and wake
And understanding fill us with its power,
So that energized we might stir and then re-take
From feral hands the febrile stem of the nation’s flower.
Men of ill intent usurped the offices of state
And so the state ere long was organized for crime
‘Gainst we for whom their scams did seal the fate
Of a nation pushed, not fallen, to decline.
Yet every one of us ne’er less did play our part,
For where we dare not look does evil bloom
And the sum of all our blind eyes turned grew vast
And for the spread of evil obligingly made room.
The collective irresponsibilities of folk in truth
Do government’s tomfoolery comprise,
For where from decency they hold themselves aloof,
Entrusting it to criminals, it dies.
Behind each sorry aspect of this mess there lies
Some criminal self-serving with intent,
For good men’s efforts never would contrive
To snare good men in such predicament.
For evil to take root and win the day
Alone requires that good men all do naught:
They sleep or wait or look away
And so forfeit the battles they never truly fought.
I would have fought of course, I always planned
To rise and join the fray.
I hope you will forgive I lived life second-hand;
I thought of it but my armchair barred the way.
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