For the New Republic(s)
em = By Linda Martin
The right wing and its apologists
(I do not count myself amongst them
unless stranded on the fence)
admired Mrs Thatcher's strength
Who else they say
could mend the tears in imperialism's armoury
or set to right accounts
rubbed raw by an undeserving poor?
A country too old, too complacent
to squarely face
a commercial fate,
or to thrive in its embrace,
was obstructed in its modernising task,
tied to its past and ancient constitution
a later source of major disillusion
The accepted and "divine" unstated
seal of monarchy
could not be challenged
or its fall anticipated
But some
fine, but undeserving few
doleful, soulful emigrés like me
dismembered, unremembered inter-generational amputees
born of ancestral wanderlust and gratuitous cannon balls
got cut off, frustrated
abandoned, neo-nated
an ungodly and dispirited lot
who tried to bury ancient wounds in English garden plots
Comfortably we settled down
to cultivate our barren apathetic lands
accepting ill-considered imperial direction
Till now we stand to face a greater insurrection
A new self-consciousness
with common soul now rightly seen as peer
will utter forth
from within, and yet beyond Westminster's "sacred" halls
to liberate
but first, appall.