in memoriam Drummer Lee Rigby

Just out for a walk after an early stack
Not looking for trouble, not watching my back
Mothers with prams holding hands with their kids
Not paying attention to the car as it skids
Caught completely off guard not expecting what comes
One man with a knife another with guns
No chance of defence no chance to fight back
Looking for help as the cowards attack
An angel arrives as the light turns to grey
A woman attempts to steer attackers away
My last thought of 'Thank You' never strays from my brain
As my body shuts down and I feel no more pain.

I look to my left and I look to my right
Thousands of squaddies are all that's in sight
Uniforms are crisp and their faces are clean
No sign of anger or hate to be seen
As if by command they salute all as one
The RSM smiles, says 'Welcome home son'.

Anonymous

In Flanders Fields

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Posted on Remembrance Sunday 2009

For the Fallen

FOR THE FALLEN

Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Posted on Remembrance Day 2009

Bright Star

BRIGHT STAR

by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art -
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors -
No---yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon in death.

Noticed in Reader's Digest, November 2009

Lepanto

LEPANTO

G.K. CHESTERTON

Noticed in a reference in Conservative History Journal

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain--hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,--
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still--hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,--
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed--
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign--
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.

Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

Ode to a City

I found this in an old case of my Mum's - I don't think she could think of a last line for the second verse.

I still love dear old Glasgow
Even though it's changed its face
From cosy teeming tenements
Replaced by motorways.

Old Townhead's now departed
Springburn's fading fast
The Garngad's now called Royston

But I still love dear old Glasgow
Despite its concrete clay
Adorning all new buildings
For that's the modern way.

Remember all the shipyards
And railway work galore
The ICI and Parkhead Forge
And many many more.

Yet I still love my old city
Tho' I miss the days gone by
When cinemas and theatres
Put a sparkle in your eye.

Remember all the dance halls
When we danced the nights away
And oh those paddle steamers
That sailed the Clyde each day.

And most of all, the dear old trams
That ran from morn till night
They were Glasgow's pride and joy
Now they too are out of sight.

But now we're in the eighties
And my city's still dear to me
Yet I often wish the young ones
Could have seen Glasgow as it used to be.


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the spirit of the G.R.I

THE SPIRIT OF THE G.R.I [Glasgow Royal Informary]

Dr John Fergus

[In this poem Dr Fergus makes reference to St Mungo's (Glasgow Cathedral) and the graveyard in its grounds, and to the Necropolis, a graveyard just to its north - both in sight of the Royal Infirmary.]

More than a hundred years have rolled
Since near God's house it raised its head-
A house of hope, of life, of love,
Beside the dwellings of the dead.

There stand the twane - the Almighty's fane,
Where lie the dead in hallowed ground:
The shrine of suffering - and in both
The spirit of the Lord is found.

For not in temples made with hands
Doth God alone delight to dwell:
The humble, reverent, stretching heart
The world's great Master pleaseth well.
The hymn of human thankfulness,
That rises hence throughout the years,
Strikes sweeter far than incensed praise
Upon the Almighty's listening ears.

The higher that the Temple stands,
The deeper is the quarry riven:
From pain's dark depths were hewn the stones
That raise this Temple nearer heaven.
And who the builders? Look around
If you their multitude would see -
The sick, the halt, the lame, the blind,
Poor brethren of adversity -

Each bringing to the destined place
The polished stone of thankful praise,
That, slowly garnered through the years,
At length the perfect fabric raise,
Which stands unblemished in its strength
And still shall stand while ages roll,
Firm-braced against the shocks of Time
By stanchions of the human soul.

Heaven knows how many feet have trod
The dark Gethsemane of pain
And who shall say what weary ones
Must pace its pathways yet again:
But from this Temple's open door
There stretches forth a radiant light,
Cheering their path, and leading on
These suffering pilgrims of the night.

If to a Calvary - their cross
Seems lightened by the wondrous rays;
Or, if with stronger step they pass
Back to men's busy haunts and ways,
They bear with them across the years,
Where'er Life's toilsome path they trace,,
Some shining radiance, faint and bright,
Of the Shekinah of this place.


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