SWEET LAND
Ain’t got no health care.
Congress, they took it, but hell!
I’ve still got my guns.
I ain’t got no dough
For health insurance, so I
Put my trust in God.
Ain’t got no money
For my meds, got no estate
For zero Death Tax.
Fallin’ through the cracks.
Welcome to America,
‘Cos it’s great again!
© Copyright RC Clermont 2017
Life in the fast lane;
defective product. Bin it;
Write, Live, Love, Escape
© Copyright RC Clermont 2015
From: ‘Reflections 3‘. (available at Amazon; part of the ‘Reflections‘ series of haiku verse).
Computer-scored theme,
Optimistic,
This the corporate
World vision pitch.
Drone-footage sweeps
Of city scapes,
Fields and pastures,
Of azure skies.
Bright-faced families,
Blonde, clean-clothed, white-toothed,
Immaculately groomed,
The dream, marketed.
Whither the poisoned springs,
Ground waters, streams and rivers?
Chemical spillages,
Enviro damages?
The corrupted civil servants,
In-the-pocket politicians?
The workhouse conditions
And child slave-labourers?
The overburdened mothers,
Humiliated fathers?
The jobless degree-holders,
And zero-hours contractors?
© Copyright RC Clermont 2017
Beneath this great lake
Lies once prestige real estate,
And if evoked with joyful coldness,
The once landed had become landless.
At night, those City towers no longer blaze wastefully.
When darkness falls, the only lights to see
Are those of buoys in warning,
Blinking and bobbing,
And channel- marking
Where it’s safe for daytime boating parties
And picture-taking touring barges
For navigating leisurely.
© RC CLERMONT 2017
Further still westward
Stand England’s symbols of Church and State;
The towers of the Minster Abbey
Wherein the nation’s monarchs were annoited
To Zadok chorals and vivat, vivat,
And, standing in propinquity,
The remnants, collapsed partially,
Of Pugin’s Parliament,
And, no longer extant,
The clock tower in arrest perpetually.
No more laws of enslavement
Or of Malthusian experiment.
© Copyright RC Clermont 2017
A visual history tour can be taken.
In silent dignity
The upper structures of Wren’s Panthéon
Stand in an interpretation
Of Canaletto’s transportation
Of that great cathedral
To the Venetian Canal Grand.
One can espy
The Tower Bridge structures,
And Guilliaume’s keep prison.
Panning further west, one can wonder
At the finger of the communications tower.
© Copyright RC Clermont 2017
To a new generation –
Not having witnessed the inundation-
These now dead icons
Standing in the Basin
Is as if their construction
Had been on the instruction
Of a late vain-glorious tycoon,
And which now stand like follies
Upon a vast ornamental lagoon.
Ergo, it is adjudged, this vain exhibition
Belies the savage activity
That once occurred therein.
© Copyright RC Clermont 2017
The Great Surge, the history
Calls it officially.
Gleefully, many see it differently;
The Great Transformation,
The Great Revolution;
Beyond the wildest imagination
As if Nature in symbiotic reply
Had answered anger and indignation,
As if in its own volition
Wrought a cataclysm
In a raging iconoclasm.
© RC CLERMONT 2017
How menacingly they once loomed
Above the metropolis;
Some believed that these totems
And the hard-faced demi-gods
Within trading instruments
Could harness the power
Of the Universe.
Now no-one holds such dreads
As one observes the waterfowl
And the gannets and the gulls squalling and wheeling
And nesting among those titanic skyscrapers
Or bobbing nonchalantly in their lees.
RC Clermont 2017
My latest post, The View From Parliament Hill, was first developed as an idea in the Spring of 2017. Many will be familiar with Parliament Hill, either via images, films, television, or having walked in Parliament Hill Fields, from where there is a panoramic view of London and the capital’s towering landmarks. Indeed, over the past decade, further skyscrapers have proliferated in the cityscape and have occluded, arguably, a once serene vista.
In this age of austerity, following the crash of 2008 – from which followed the promulgation of macro-economic policies directly or indirectly against the ninety-nine per cent to defray the malfeasance of the one per cent. The towers in the City of London were, and are, symbols of the defective capitalistic model that wrecked the livelihoods of the many. Indeed, London has become an off-shore haven for overseas finance and property investors, making the nation’s capital a febrile and unaffordable place to live and work.
This poem imagines a future when major event causes a transformation, not a revolution, but something unstoppable. Some may see it as dystopian, others as transformative. The reader will be able to conclude for themselves what that event will be.
This poem of nine stanzas was written months before hurricane season [2017] in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. I considered it timely to publish extracts here.
This poem is ‘free verse’, and though there are rhymes, pararyhmes, assonances and consonances within stanzas, there is no fixed rhyme scheme or metre.
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I have previously written haiku/senru, tanka and a series ‘Posted Notes’. Please refer to previous posts on my page. My ‘haiku’ verses are part of my ‘Reflections’ series, which are available at Amazon.
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