Poppies

With a doff of the hat to Tony Harrison

Don’t ask me if these words echo serene,
they twist like metal - beaten Damascene
to tell a story of resistance and of slaughter:
language in one mouth crying out
in another opens a battle shout:
a soldier raping and pillaging your daughter,
a small part of the spoils to the winner.
Behind a shed men beat death before dinner,
burn with lust just lucky to be alive,
Kundalini thrusting up their spine
fuel hotter than the buckets of wine
they down before making a dessert of wives.
These words know more than men who sieze and whore
the mortal coil for oil and go to war.

We think of it as desert, dune and scrub
land, where jackels and camel jockeys rub
along together: a flea-bit and threadbare place
in need of governance: a democratic education
beating minds to soften up the exploitation
of petroleum wealth, of influence and face:
hospitality corrupted and confused,
ignored when it suits and by suits abused
with no intended reciprocity.
Sign on the line and leave it up to us,
we’ll modernise and industrialise you, plus
you’ll have access to Western charity
doled out like the seeds of millet that you save
to scatter thinly on the family grave.

The civilising influx of naked power
flies on stubby wings hour after hour
dropping buildings like a house of card
while news crews scurry to sanitise the screen;
showing legless feet and human meat’s obscene.
A surgical strike is easy, the healing after, hard
in hospitals without dressings, drugs or staff;
where poppys grow: no morphine? Makes you laugh.
I’d plant rope too, and coke and send slow death
back to us. Fist the sky and cry
you took my child, let this let you watch yours die.
I’d breathe vengeance with my last breath
and know that when a land has had its back
to the wall, students won’t want books in a rucksack.


I don’t get the sense we’re waking up;
the earth is just a ewe to Yankee tup
and inconvenient people are like fleas
on an annoying pet; put it down
and soon the sorry children will come round
with open arms to ask the parents please
if you won’t give me love then give me cash;
and, its not my heart that’ll open but a gash
between my legs or in my head where nothing’s felt,
where innocence is numb and truth obscene,
where secrets breed and no thought is clean.
A house of cards? A killer hand we dealt
and like the house we’ll take the stakes and run
for moral high ground under a opium sun.


George Roberts
09 March 2006