A song for a sad day.

Brain keeps singing songs - even today, when the news is so bad and the country has gone crazy. Scotland votes to stay in Europe? No matter. We don't have the say. But the songs keep coming, and maybe it makes me feel better to let them. I'm not up to more cerebral poems anyway.


Unity no more

I woke up this morning
with the sun on my face
for a moment lay peaceful
just a moment of grace

till the memory roused me
of the graphs and the polls
and I reached to discover
that we’d traded our souls.

The country had chosen
to be duped in their choice,
to reclaim some lost freedom
to follow the voice

of those who shout hatred
for the lost and the strange
who would make us a fortress
put up barriers to change.

But the sun is still shining
and the birds sing in tune
and it’s only the people
who will recognise soon

That it’s too late for thinking
and it’s too late for love
and the voices have drowned out
the song of the dove

And the magpies are fighting on the grass
And the magpies are fighting on the grass.

C.M.M. 24/06/16

Song

It's strange how one can be so influenced in one's writing by what's going in - visually, through reading the work of other writers, or - as in this case - audibly. I've recently been listening to a good bit of Leonard Cohen's music - realise I enjoy it far more now than when he and I were both much younger, when he had the kind of voice I didn't care for at the time. But what interests me now is that with that rhythm in my brain, I've found myself thinking in a lyric metre - and that the journey there was far more seductive than the suggestion made over the years by one critic of my work that I should discipline my writing in this way.

Not that this is disciplined - and not that I took much time over it. It's a song looking for a tune, and it's a song for now, for me now and in this time, when I know that all over Britain people of my generation are going to vote to leave Europe and I feel ashamed, when politics are vile, when my friends seem self-selecting and everyone else is lost.

 I also feel furious - but all that happens is a song without a melody.

But for what it's worth ...

SONG

When I think about today
and what I am and where
and the world keeps crashing in
with anger - do I care?

Well yes, I find I’m thinking,
though nothing seems to move
in the world that I inhabit
in the people that I love -

but the violence and sorrow
and the voices screaming hate
cut across my passive questions
take me out beyond my gate

to the people sunk in apathy
to the old and the unwise,
drive me far beyond the safety zone
to where the world cries.

And though I’m growing older
and common sense says fear
in my heart I’m still protesting
in my head it still seems clear

that we cannot stand and wonder
while the world dissolves in flame -
we must fight to save the future
not live content with shame.

C.M.M. 06/16