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Europe

CONFUSED ALARMS

One of my favourites poems is Dover Beach.

I read it first at school when I was fifteen.

It seemed a fine thing to have written –

evocative, erudite, sonorous,

personal. Matthew Arnold, the advocate

of ‘sweetness and light’, honeymooned abroad

the year of the Great Exhibition.

Returning to England they stayed the night

at the Lord Warden Hotel – before taking

the train to London – no doubt to recover

from the paddle steamer that ferried them

across the English Channel, a craft,

though independent of the wind, tossed

by the waves, whose swaddled passengers travelled

au dehors. The poem begins ‘The sea

is calm tonight.’ From his window he can see

across to the French coast where a light gleamed

briefly. He calls his wife to his side,

and they listen to ‘the grating roar’ of the tide,

the unceasing waves shifting the pebbles.

 

For Arnold Great Britain was not the land

of ingenuities the Crystal Palace

hymned but of Blake’s dark factories. ‘…the world

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain…’

What would he have thought of us who measure

this country’s wealth in Costa coffee spoons,

eschew the Europe whose cultural heritage

is ours, make dishonour a virtue,

and still send tens of thousands of children

hungry to shared beds in inadequate rooms!

‘And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.’

 

 

 

OCCAM’S RAZOR…

…a maxim named for a Franciscan friar,

William of Ockham, from the Surrey village –

and from London, Oxford, Avignon,

Munich – Pope’s enemy, Emperor’s friend,

dying just as the Black Death was scourging.

 

It is a metaphor, not logic chopping –

best summarised, perhaps, as ‘less is more’,

‘don’t over-egg the pudding’, even

‘fine words butter no parsnips’. He was

the radical philosopher of his age,

a nominalist – words are words, ideas

ideas, no more, no less. Plato, relinquo!

 

Avoiding an A3 rush hour traffic jam,

I drove through Ockham one rainy night,

watching the headlights follow the bendy turns

of the old field system and glisten

on the hedgerows and the oaks, and I thought

of the little boy, the brightest scholar

in the priest’s small school, being taken

for Mother Church’s future to London

in a jolting ox cart, his Latin

a passport through Europe.

 

 

 

MOUNTAIN VIEW

Some time after midnight, when the bars have closed,

the hoots and laughter of revellers

on the stone-clad stairs wakes us. Much later

wind, billowing through the open corridors

of the steel framed building, shakes our door

intermittently like some errant soul.

In the shallow valley below the hotel

a cock crows above the gusts and the rattles.

 

***

 

In the morning a warm west wind blows

over the sea from what was Carthage.

The valley slopes gradually to a cove.

Before tourism this was wilderness –

only the tideless waves on the gritty beach.

Now there are a score or so of sun loungers,

two tavernas, two supermarkets and a bar –

and some smallholdings amongst the scrub.

 

***

 

On the other side of the valley are

two more resort hotels like this, open

from May to October. At night, they are lit

like cruise ships. Beyond is Mount Vasiliko –

wind turbines on its slopes and, at its summit,

a monitoring post. Mare Nostrum

is everybody’s – a dozen or more navies,

and thousands of desperate optimists.

 

***

 

From the terrace by the pool, we can see,

through mountainous clefts, Mount Ida’s peak.

At the summit is Timios Stavros,

the Holy Cross chapel. In a cave

on its slopes, Zeus was born. Swifts call above us –

ecumenical, celestial, their flight

calligraphic. Crete is shaped like a

scabbardfish, feinting between Europe

and Africa. I think of the empty,

wintry rooms – the patience of islanders

used to long absences.

 

 

 

THINKING OF AMERICA

‘Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force.’

MAKING AMERICA WHITE AGAIN, Toni Morrison

 

Twenty five years ago – the year of the First

Gulf War, the launching of the World Wide Web,

the repeal of South Africa’s Apartheid Law,

and the ‘End of History’ – one August

Saturday in Godfrey, Illinois –

a town on the Mississippi bluffs –

I watched the wooden New England style

Church of Christ at Monticello cross the road,

on hydraulic jacks, to the Lewis & Clark

Community College campus. The crowd

was affable, and overwhelmingly white.

A marching band played ‘Tie a yellow ribbon’,

and Old Glory was in abundance.

To cheers the steeple bell was rung and rung.

 

The college had been the Monticello

Female Seminary, founded in

1835 by Captain Godfrey –

a retired fisherman from Cape Cod –

for whom the town was named. He believed,

‘When you educate a woman you

educate a family’. He admired

Thomas Jefferson – Founding Father,

president and conflicted slave owner –

so named the finishing school after

his primary Virginia plantation.

 

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark –

U.S. Army officer volunteers –

were commissioned by President Jefferson

to map the West, mind the French, impress the Sioux

and expand the concept of the thirteen states

beyond the confluence of the great rivers.

They set off from the banks of the nearby

Wood River and crossed the Mississippi

to sail up the Missouri to its source

two thousand miles away in the Rockies

across the lush and pristine Great Plains.

 

*

 

In the small town on the limestone bluffs

where bald eagles nest above the river

Adams, Washington, Franklin et al

would have felt at home that August day,

recognising most present as descendants –

collegial,  patriotic, Anglophone,

Protestant and white. Now, across the vast

darkling fields of the republic, they would hear

incessantly Jefferson’s prescient

‘…the knell of the Union…this act

of suicide…of treason against the hopes

of the world…a fire bell in the night…’

clanging, clanging, clanging.

 

 

 

MONKS’ MOUND, CAHOKIA, ILLINOIS

The river valleys – Missouri, Ohio,
Illinois, Mississippi – are thronged
with prehistoric earthen mounds. Monks’ Mound
was lived on briefly by Trappists, hence
its English soubriquet. The city
of Cahokia – the name means ‘Wild Geese’ –
was six miles square, had more than eighty mounds.
At its thirteenth century zenith,
it was as populous as any city
in the then contemporary Europe.

The Trinculos and Stephanos came:
mockers and con men – drunken, violent,
slaughtering bison, fencing the prairie –
satraps of Washington and the railways,
converting, through alcohol, to the true faith
of dependence and destitution,
those whom they determined were Caliban.

Monk’s Mound is one hundred feet high. Westwards,
beyond the black slums of East St Louis,
over the river, on the waterfront,
is St Louis’s Gateway Arch – six hundred
and thirty stainless steel feet to celebrate
the final subjugation of the land.

 

 

 

 

ONLY ARTIFICE WILL REMAIN

When a joiner made the oak frame of this

long sash window, when a builder set it

in the wall, when a glazier puttied

in the panes that keep the weathers in their place,

all I would have seen were hedges, fields, ponds

and grazing dairy cattle – before the rise,

the decline and the fall, in a hundred

and sixty years, of so many empires.

 

When I stand on the back doorstep and search

for the stars amid the urban glare and the overcast

and then look down I see me silhouetted

in the gazebo’s windows – like the figure,

in ‘Las Meninas’, whom we see through

an open door, having paused climbing the stairs

to briefly watch paint capture majesty.

 

I think of Xerses, anticipating

victory over all of Greece, the world,

watching his armies cross the Bosporus

into Europe, suddenly weeping,

knowing that none of them would be alive

a hundred years from then – and longing

for the pillars and for the gardens

of Persepolis. A century or more

later, Alexander the Great will scourge

the city’s entire populace. Only

artifice will remain.