History

Social Capital in Spades

The custom, in war, is that

Civilians do not go forth

And confront the enemy.

That is the job of soldiers.

The job of civilians is

To shout ‘Hurrah’ at rallies,

Work hard, and passively

Suffer the military

Going about their business.

May 1940 changed that.

The call went out by wireless, 

Phone and anxious word of mouth:

 ‘The army’s fallen back on

‘To the coast nearby Dunkirk. 

‘We have to get them off ’fore

‘Jerry wipes the rearguard out.

‘The Navy’s hastening there, but

‘(Little time, so many men)

 ‘Cannot handle it alone.

‘Can you, your boat help them out?’

That sudden, desperate call launched

A citizen Armada,

Like none the world had ever seen.

Some seven hundred small ships

(Yachts and fishing boats, pleasure

Cruisers and paddle steamers)

Set off for the Belgian coast,

Intent on helping rescue

Three hundred thousand soldiers

With their backs against the sea.

They chugged in slow civilian

Style to Dunkirk’s dire beaches.

There, strafed by Luftwaffe fighters

And bombed by diving Stukas,

They took on weary men; then

 (If they survived the barrage)

Chugged back and forth across the

Channel o’er nine fraught days

In which, against all hope, that

Battered army made it home.

The Power of a Song
 
How to explain, in a new century,
The sense of awful, imminent peril
In the darkest days of a global war
(Germans driving inexorably east,
Japan driving inexorably south)
That oppressed even a minimal teen
On a havened island at the world’s end?

How to explain, in a new century,
The sweet pang of hope that pierced the gloom 
When Vera Lynn sang of blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover, and of Jimmy? 
Millions were comforted, many through tears.
Where Winston’s defiance stiffened our will, 
Vera’s tenderness gave voice to our dream.

Memorial 

Once, in old Soviet-land,
Was a pride-puffed Field-Marshal,
Chest Stalin-beribboned and
A gleaming gold epaulette
On each shoulder proclaiming  
His ineffable station. 

Came a day of display of 
Soviet might (atomic
In kind) that went gravely wrong.
The one trace left of Marshal  
And party was smouldering 
Scraps of two gold epaulettes.  

 

A Hard Truth for Armchair Revolutionaries

The history is clear

(Exempt one amazing

American moment):

Revolutions focussed

On killing opponents

Routinely end up with

Thugs entrenched and enthroned.

The Icelanders’ Revenge

Perched polar-high, a bony

Little island of barren

Glaciers and treeless plains

And live volcanic fissures,

Iceland untroubled the world

Until the Global Crisis

When it dearly bought renown

By suddenly collapsing,

Owing billions to foreign  

Interests lacking pity.

The equation reversed when

Renown again came, borne on 

The wings of a west wind that

Drove the silica spew of 

A name-retching volcano 

Into Europe’s crowded skies. 

The world choked as the ash cloud

Mantled great nations, grounding

Their jet fleets, stifling their trade,

And stranding millions beyond.

In Iceland, meanwhile, airports   

Stayed open, planes flew and folk

Smiled at the thought of Europe

Now pleading for ‘cash, not ash’.

Day ten, and game ended when

An easterly swung all back

To global nonentity.

But the history stands: for

Nine giddy days, a gaunt wee  

Land stopped the world in its tracks.

Appearance and Truth

It will never, ever cease to chill

That monsters can look so run of the mill: 

Like bluff and avuncular Uncle Joe,

Adolf, his comic lock and toothbrush mo, 

And the chubby twinkle of Chairman Mao.

Confronting these three faces ex novo,

How could you possibly expect to know  

Each indifferently murdered millions?

To Dogged Marxists

It’s now crystal-clear that,

Empirically, Karl 

Stuffed it totally up.

Surely, it’s time to come clean? 

Bureaucracy Ghoulish

Twentieth-century regimes
Dedicated to mass killing 
In pursuit of utopia
(Making a ‘new Soviet man,’
Creating a ‘thousand-year’ Reich,
Clearing the scum from ‘Year-zero’)
Were prone to record their murders.
So often, a file for each corpse,
A photo, a name or at least
A bare number in a death list;
Entered, ordered and preserved by
Tidy-minded desk-bound butchers

The Proletarian Pharaohs

It’s a well-established Communist trait
That dead founders must be put on display.
Lenin and Stalin, and old Ho Chi Minh,
Mao Tse Tung, Kim Il-sung, Gottwald and kin,
Their bodies embalmed are laid out in state,
While Marx himself rots in modest Highgate.

Yet his vision (an oppressed working class
That Communism liberates at last)
Was betrayed by each proclaimed Marxist saint.
Subjugation, not freedom, was the taint
Of their times, with Gulags, murders unnamed 
And, their legacy, economies maimed.

The Difference a Century Makes

Thousands die on the Somme:

At home, curt telegrams;

In France, perfunctory

Battle-field burials.

One dies in Oruzgan:

The body is brought home,

And the Prime Minister

Attends the funeral.

Organ Transplants in a ‘Socialist Market Economy’       

In the capitalist West  
You sweat in a queue waiting   
For a death from natural
Or accidental causes.  

In the People’s Republic
Of China, no need to wait:  
Just put up the money and
Arrange a suitable time.

Prisoners, pre-tested, in
Abundant supply, always 
On tap: stubborn Falun Gong 
Are strongly represented. 

Harvesting’s a doddle since 
Each unconsenting donor  
Is pre-rewarded with a
Kindly bullet to the head.  







Country Codes

Of one thing you can 

Be quite certain 

In this spinning world: 

If the official 

Name of a country 

Includes ‘People’s’ or

‘Democratic’ (or 

Both), its government

Rests on thuggery.  

 
An Ozymandias Touch
 
A recent traveller from
A far-off antique land told
Of weathered nomadic tents
With solar panel above,
A satellite dish beside,
A flickering screen within.
And all around the lone and
Level sands stretched far away.
 

From the Maori:
The Making of a River

Long ago when the world
Was young and changeable
Four mighty volcanoes
Dwelt kindly together.

Wise old Ruapehu;
Two lads, Taranaki,
Tongariro, and fair
Lass Ngauruhoe.

As lads and lasses do,
These three gaily flirted
Until one fateful day
Ngauruhoe chose.

And chose Tongariro!
Anguished Taranaki
(who really loved her best)  
Uprooted and fled west.

And so he stands today,
Alone, majestic near
The coast, called ‘Egmont’ by
Admiring pakeha.

Yet agonising was
His journey there, for he 
Dragged tender roots across
Harsh, unforgiving lands. 

Thus, in pain, he furrowed
Deep and birthed a river
Of towering gorges 
And wild tumbling rapids. 

‘Whanganui’, it’s now 
Known to most, but sweeter
Told in Maori tongue as
‘Taranaki’s Sorrow’. 

Osama’s Failure

In New York, the twin towers crumbled;

In Virginia, the Pentagon burned;

Over Pennsylvania, minutes

From Washington, United Flight 

Ninety-three was on a jihad course:

All on board (cell-phone informed) knew that.

At the back, a few brave men conferred,

Counted the cost and determined to

Deny the jihadists a third coup.

So (at the signal, ‘Let’s roll’) they charged,

Bare-handed, down narrow aisles and on

To the box-knives guarding the cockpit.

It will never be known who or how 

Many of them died, slashed by those knives.

But all the world knows they won the day:

Flight ninety-three crashed (no survivors)

In a paddock close by to Shanksville,

Well short of its Washington target.

From Osama bin Laden’s Killer

After countless rehearsals
I was at the pointy end,
Bounding up contested stairs.
We found him standing bed-side,   
Two women as shields; others
Cleared them from my line of sight.  

My instructions were simple. 
No parley, straight to the kill 
(High or low, ‘we want the face’).    
I focussed, two rapid shots:
First the heart, second the head.
He hurtled backward, soundless.

Then the rush was on to move
The body and the records. 
All up, just forty minutes
We took to complete the job. 
Later on, the President
Shook my hand, thanked me for it. 

Bomber Command

2014

Youths on the lip of life,
Hasty trained (that alone
Costs five thousand dead) as
Pilots, navigators,
Gunners; then given ‘wings’
To wear proud on their chest.

Fly lumbering bombers
Nightly from England through
Fingering searchlights, flak
And fleet Luftwaffe fighters.
Constant post-op question:
‘Who hasn’t made it back?’

Loss rates dwarf all others: 
Just one in six complete 
Thirty ‘tours’, are furloughed.
Many then spurn safe posts 
And fly back to the flak.
One in forty survive.

What was it moved them to
Dice so deadly with death:
The cause, mateship, pride, the
Ultimate risk-taking?
We can’t know; but we can
Celebrate their courage.

 

VJ Day in Wellington, New Zealand

(15 August 1945)

2015

My staid little city 
Went mad on the day the 
Emperor surrendered.
We danced in the street, sang,
Cheered, hugged and laughed wildly.
 

‘Victory in Europe’
Had earlier given 
Great joy, but ‘Victory
Over Japan’ took us
To the edge of ecstasy. 

At long last the War was
Over, and the cruellest 
Of conquerors routed! 

      How the ‘Arab Spring’ Failed
          the Girl in the Blue Bra
 2017

Cairo’s Tahrir square: ten thousand women    
Bravely chant, ‘the girls of Egypt are here!’
Full-veiled, she is plucked from the ranks by the
Tyrant’s soldiers, thrown to the ground, beaten,
Kicked, and stripped down to a bright blue bra.  

Several days and many deaths later,
She’s back at the square (in spirit at least)
Applauding the fall of the tyrant with
Her sisters and thousands more, daring to    
Dream of a lighter, less trammelled future.  

But all too soon, the vaunted election 
(Though honest for once) dashes the dream by 
Empowering the Muslim Brotherhood 
Which moves with zealous, impolitic haste 
To clear the way to Sharia law.

So, as ever, the middle-road soldiers 
Step in, raise their own, and save the blue-bra  
Girl from the full weight of Sharia law. 
But, as to dreams, she gains nothing from the
Day she was brutalised in Tahrir square. 

Assessing the Bolshevik Revolution
      On its Centenary

November 7 2017

There is one central fact:
It is that in the years
After Lenin’s triumph,
Communist governments
Together murdered (in
One way or another)
More of their own folk than
All who died in World War II.

Of British Colonialism

2020

Injustice, exploitation, genocide,

Yes, they were part of the process, as we

Are constantly, properly reminded; 

But it is proper, too, to remember 

That of all the old colonial powers 

It was the British who most often left

Genuine democracies in their wake.   

Fancy That!

2023

Who could have imagined, not so long ago,  

That a small, untidy blob of a country,  

Set high in the cold North Sea, 

Would one day provide the language  

Of high diplomacy in a prideful world?      

It all happened because, a bit earlier,

Peace, politics and opportunity 

Had turned the blob into the voracious   

Seafaring power that built the British Empire - 

On which the sun, indeed, never set. 

Then came the big backflip of the modern era.  

In the West at least, imperialism fell out of fashion.  

Colonies were shed, most with sufficient goodwill. 

The British often left, as well, the legacy of  

A well-used local version of the English language:  

Unifying, a simple calligraphy,  

Easy-going (language-purloining a rule),  

And international heights already secured,   

A second, greater British empire is on the cards.  

Unless Comrade Xi has something up his sleeve.