The garden is no more grown than was when left,
the Sea Spray of Portsmouth the Grime of Waterloo
Cling fresh beneath the reawakening memories of you.
Between the leaving and their return the world shifted
their brains rattled by battery and bomb,
Something replaced the life in them and something now is gone.
The surrender of innocence on English Summer evenings
was stolen by the rape of youth and a fleeting fuck of liberation,
Is a bottle of flat brown beer enough to drown their bitter indignation?
They must now retreat from the front they made themselves
to cower silently in their peaceful rage,
Returning to sweet freedoms won, inside a gilded cage.
Phones squat like idle frogs on lily pad desks
screensavers roll impatient eyes so unimpressed
the cleaners missed the paper cups
where penicillin grows un-supped
the water coolers sulk forlorn
no whispered love no spat out scorn
When static has no hair to raise
it saves itself for future days
unseen in its electric shroud it wanders
lonely for the crowd
no hills or vales to float on by
pressed up beneath a white tiled sky
And those who parted from this place
the Exodus’d the chosen race
who once beyond the crippling cage
re-found themselves and turned a page
might they retain their hearts that sing
when once again the squat frogs ring
Sprung deep between the cracks of the slabs in Peckham Rye
come the sprigs of empires children their old masters to defy.
Here where Blake saw angels where shepherds quenched a thirst,
the outcast and the stolen are reaching to be first.
From terraces and tower blocks confined as the unseen,
they soar with aspirations beyond their silent dreams.
Though Highwaymen of history defoliate the past,
their shoots will not be stunted as they forge upwardly at last.
English roses clipped and rootless look so pretty on the shelf,
Smooth stemmed, perfumed, useless, soul-less in their wealth.
Stronger grow the slum-flowers that climb toward the Sun
for abundant is the garden that is sown for everyone.
Reverse search a pool of blood to its foetus of ideas,
calculate trajectories to a pin-head through the years.
While stippling marks proximity the silenced tongue won’t speak,
for its hell that takes our liberty when damp Earth entombs the meek.
In cavities of ancient skulls the dust of time drowns words
where cave walls once were libraries, now echoes fall unheard.
Where hit-list’s flamed in burn-pits and armies forged their prize,
re-written were our histories and their curses damned our eyes.
Then blinded willingly or not we sweep ahead in time
we carve sacred memorials in elevated rhyme,
and the horrors of reality will not be writ upon this page
as we flounder in our duality it is guilt that we assuage.
