Preface:- This is an anti-war poem about the death of sailors in the Royal Navy set in the era of the Napoleonic wars but referring forward to the Falkland's conflict.
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Wider Still
For whose sake are you sated,
turmoil of soiled flesh, drumming
on the boards of your coffin ship,
far from your old namers, once-a-man?
Tap out a fine and flinging rhythm
to the silent service; impress
those officers who stagger at the grape-
shot on swept quarter-decks.
You became a plait of arterial filaments
at the rope's end, that a rolling
gait of Titans lumbering to foreseen brawls
should suffer no logistical cramps.
Your posterity will first be a listing
to port, a little braid of words -
on numbed lips mouthing back the annunciation,
a toothed, blue bruise of futility.
Then chipped clear of clinkered curses,
your fused heart can be re-cast,
minutely to augment the monumental
perjury of a common, heroic sacrifice:-
a tool more potent than memorial columns -
red end transmuted, turgidly to swell
ecstatic hag-ravings of a withered futurity -
your ultimate dishonour.
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The poem employs puns and associations of words from the historic Navy. The ironic title is taken from the Jingoistic song 'Land of Hope and Glory' Being 'sated' here is to die, since the severely injured man is drumming his legs on the deck in agony as he is dying. The 'old namers' would be his parents and peers back home. 'Silent service' refers not to submariners but to the fact that sailors worked for the most time in silence unlike their merchant counterparts. Drums were used, however. Working at 'the rope's end' was the use of on the spot flogging to speed up work or to deal with minor grumblings. The cat o' nine tails was used for significant flogging. ;'Listing' as well as a tilt in the ship refers to the lists of dead.
The last verse refers forward to the Faulklands conflict, Margaret Thatcher being the raving hag referred to. I still believe she engineered the war, but if instead she was merely incredibly stupid as not to foresee the Argentinian invasion after she left the islands undefended, she knew full well it would be her salvation if she could win them back and ensure that instead of her dismal poll ratings prior to the victory she would be re-elected for a second term.
Thus the 'red end' bloody death of the soldiers and sailors, is transformed (phallically in the ironic image of a turgid red-end) into political power of a victory. Let it be remembered that military personnel in wheelchairs and on crutches were not allowed in the victory parade. Very soon many veterans joined the swelling number of Thatcher's homeless and destitute. So it, unfortunately, goes.
The poem was written shortly after Bluff Cove.
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Tapestries
PoetryPoems from 1978 onwards. These poems are in a different style from the later MajorSeventh, the earlier ones often with more of an Eastern-influenced cadence. Later, they vary a lot in form and style.
