Mr President,

I wrote this poem for a reading at the start of March, just before Super Tuesday. I thought, then, that after that day the subject of ‘The Trump’ would no longer be relevant and a poem on these lines would be dead and buried. As we all know, he is still here, still winning, still scaring half the world, so, unfortunately, this poem still has a purpose

The poem was inspired, in part at least, by a portrait of George Washington, the First President of the USA, and designer of the American Constitution.

Mr President,

how proud would you be today 
of your great American dream?
How proud would you be
to see your hand of power reaching out,
holding down, blowing up, seeking out,
all in the name of freedom.

Mr President,
you in your fine stockings
and shiny pointed shoes, your long black coat,
such a noble stature,
the great statesman,
let your stern eyes see what you started,
back then, in your greatest hour.

You made the constitution,
you were the first to win its power,
to embody new ideas of liberty.
You made the greatest nation.
Your hand reached out to all the world
to make a new kind of civilisation,
Mr President,

you created the freedom to kill, to torture,
to bomb and maim,
to gas, to napalm, to wage war
on all those you do not understand,
and all who do not accept your dominance,
wherever they may be in whatever foreign land.

You started with the Chicasaw and Choctaw wars.
You took your arms and soldiers to
Mexico and on to south America;
where you imposed your own new laws.
You fought the Spanish and Japanese,
you battled in China, Korea, the Congo and Cuba,
the Middle East, Lebanon, Libya,
Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan,
you fought the Taliban
and Daesh.

You back other regimes in their fight
to keep nations in subjection.
All the rest of the human race
must know its place.

So how is your dream today,
Mr President.
Now that your nation has taken its powers,
to build its great unassailable towers.

Is this what you wanted?
Is it what you imagined?
The freedom to kill, to damage
to do just what you wish?
Is your liberty not a humble dish?

How proud would you be of your vision today
when your American people have given 
your freedom and power 
to he whose name I dare not even say.

What would you do today,
Mr President,
with your grand ideas of the American dream?

If you could see the way your successors run wars
how they jump at the chance to thump
some other nation,
or to dump their bombs on hospitals and refugees,
how would you feel?

Would you be moved to make a new deal?

Hockey pitch blues

 

Twenty-two pairs of pink pubescent legs,

more blotchy than rancid meat

in a butcher’s shop window,

run in unison on a freezing field.

Panting girls stumble, slip and slither

over an acre of unkind mud,

while an icy north wind bites chunks

out of their flushed fusion of thighs,

which are topped with a frill of skirt

over a flash of darkest blue –

thick and coarse, baggy, fleece-lined,

voluminous and all covering,

causing catcalls and bawdy sniggers,

those hateful, hideous navy blue knickers.

(This poem was written as a result of the @52 prompt, sports week.)

Where mountain touches sky

Where the mountain touches the sky,

let your wings spread easy, up there,

find all the space you need to fly

where the mountain touches the sky,

where moon sets and sun rises high,

where air is clear and summit bare,

where the mountain touches the sky,

let your wings spread easy, up there.