THE TRIUMPH OF
ISLAM
“That England
that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a
shameful conquest of itself.”
(Richard II,
2:1, ll. 65-6)
Sorrowful
tramp of boots on sanded streets:
In
winter’s grey, sad companies of men
Manhandle
Churchill’s coffin with dull beats
Of
drum and growling brass. Grown men and children
Sag
heads and make their peace, and St Pauls greets
The
last of England, mourned in fen and glen:
The
state he served, those thin wan faces tell,
Has
hollowed like the booming, death-march bell.
Mere
thirty years from Pericles’ repose
Refulgent
Athens died in Sparta’s fist.
In
Ludgate Hill foxish lawyers at their windows
Watched
Churchill pass and since have ticked their list
Of
state-upturning statutes which in prose
Have
sundered epic: mealy “one-world” grist
Which
Albion’s beaches ramped with unjust laws
Bringing
the millioned umma to these shores.
That
stocky soldiery, those weeping folk,
That
stark January day, in thirty years
Fast
shrivelled to an untamed tribe bespoke
On
sink estates of pierced lips and ears,
Their
pride as great-strength oxen at the yoke
Neutered
by those lawyers’ brats whose fears
Of
nation-love have brewed with other spawn
A
curdled rainbow in a sullen dawn.
On
Sundays Finsbury Park is loud with trade,
Hijab and djellaba command the scene,
A
church where once the liturgy was prayed
Disgorges
carpets of a Turkish sheen,
The
mosques are brimming, that which kept the shade
Tide-like
swamps suburbs with the muezzin’s keen;
Soon,
time-old villages, deep-valleyed towns,
Will
startle as that cold wave slaps and drowns.
The
crop-rich fields and gorse-bedazzled moors
Enfold
two thousand years of Christ-mens’ cells,
Those
chapels, caves, where what’s eternal pours
Through
being, fruitful as baptismal shells:
All
lost; a rotted people slamming doors
Against
its past must pander to the yells
Of
ghazis who in church and manor halls
Gouge
mihrabs in those age-encrusted walls.
April 2014
Note:
Umma – the worldwide
Muslim “community.”
Ghazi – a Muslim
warrior particularly one who fights against non-Muslims.
Mihrab – prayer niche
showing the direction of Mecca.
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© April 2014
For more poems by John Medlin please see Medlin the Writer blog
