postcolonial – poems 2 die for

GENERAL DIRECTION

my nose, proverbially,
close to the ground
keeping me grounded

blown by
the wind
chasing the Sun
I wandered around the farm

remembering my Hobbes’
theme of the brutish and short
life without sovereign authority
implicit social contract

recalling my Plato notion
of the ethical and philosophical
supremacy of
his ruling class

somehow I
slunk back into my idealism
thought
should stick
with democracy on
(on this hallowed day
of election)

choose
Dionysus above Apollo this
and every day

not to speak of those first
communities of the faith
before
religion got Roman

this issue
of the State
will twist you every
which way

from
state of being, to
highest states imaginable

to Empires of suffering
that we all know too well

from YouTube and TikTok
and old apartheid memories

so much in
this mindset still
needs exorcism I guess

but the green of the farm
so gleeful, intense
after this sudden splurge
of rainfall

everything gaining height
growing (forgive my
ethnocentrism) out
of its socks

gaining height, accumulating mass
giving my theme here
weight
sudden addition of
gravity

as is the general direction
(for this stage
at least
whilst
time decrees it last)

STALEY BRIDGE STALYBRIDGE

this is Staley bridge
my father’s birthplace

here is a picture
of me in a pram
my sister
in a pram

on a big bridge
crossing the Tame river

this is not
that Staley bridge where
the Saxons crushed the
Vikings
rushing back to

meet my
Norman ancestors at Hastings

and we
know what happened there

****

Yes, here we are
up front Mossley
in that picture, my
Mother

daughter of a war hero
pushing our pram

and there, no doubt,
the great cotton mills
still
doing their job though
not now in
their hey day

postmodernity,
postcoloniality

what landscape altering modes
of production ushered
in in
their wake

and here is Engels incliding
text on this place in his seminal
work on
the working class
in England

and here I am
years later, studying satire living
in his monument house
in Oxford Street Manchester

water
under this bridge, water
connecting
us all
Tipperary, Stalybridge,
Mahikeng South Africa

figures
in a Lowry paintimg
they come
and they go

water
    under this bridge then
so much water we
tend to
   forget about
                        water headed
to the port of slavery

same water in the skiffle
psychedelia of those

Sergeant Pepper people
magicians of the airwaves
conjurors of
                        a whole new
line
    in identity
fruit of the clash of
working class proclivities
with
    transcendental
mind

clash, I say,
but what a melding, beloved
blending

without which
no way this space, or place,
or room
to talk

gone these guys
or finally fading

gone
those mills of my childhood
Spitfire stories
of how
we stood alone

everything reconfigured,
outright repurposed

voices (and their words)
I fail to recognise, alien
strange

elevated above whilst
so out of frame

somehow talking all
necessities of suppression
commandeering everything

stretching

the distance below
to above

to breaking point

viewed from
the Southern tip of Africa, product
victim of
all that this is metonym of
all this place
this life
of which
I speak

ths
shock
could not be more
extreme

(so dark
these river with
their druid name

we cross
all our lives

each
every day

so quietly all
determining)