New Year’s Toast: To the Betterment of the Sassenach

May the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge crumble into dust,
May the Queen become unemployed.
May her reviewers stop over-using the word ‘pretentious’,
And her polyglot football fans be found sober abroad.

Europe from a plane window

Europe’s looking shopworn,
Only England gleams;
Electric Londinium
Blazing up petroleum.

Songs of Praise (IV)

For now life’s shape changes, and it becomes a novel
A loose repeating monster of rote-learning and kids,
And instead of forging onward, you walk a restless circle
That circumvents your loved ones, whose bounds you dare not break.

Roles

Some God wants to pay tribute to the creation,
And some to populate it. Others, unluckier, are to provide
Examples of cul-de-sac living that
Impress school-children not to stray from their path.

Fernbeziehung

for K.З.

The lovers hold a gossamer thread
Stretching over fields a hundred miles.
Vowed and given, their task till harvest
To keep an unbroken thread.

Light day light eyes

Lord, there is light in us
But why does the light sometimes seem so far away?
I have seen this light in nature sometimes,
In the faces you etched with your connossieur’s eye.

Liberation

The first thing to accept, if things are going to be alright,
Is that things are not going to be alright. You will die,
Your children will die, and love reveal itself to be
Only one of many passions. Now, what’s left?

A prayer for sanity this Christmas

We are all of us driving ourselves insane in the name of capitalism, and,
Given that we are all of us here more or less by happenstance,
Let us try to gracefully accomodate each other
And see each person’s take on how life can be lived.

Illustrated proverb

The general’s statue is a puzzle,
Yet his soldier’s letters read;
The footballers rush to read the match report,
To see who got the better score.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Songs of Praise (IV)

And then you have to flounder, for at the road’s end stands a sign
That each step until now has led you to hesitate beneath,
And ask – Why have I hurried to arrive here, through the poem of my youth,
To find a frosted sign that reads ‘Attention: Change of form ahead!’?