Poems by Jack Mitchell - GiB - A Modest Exposure
(by Jack Mitchell)
4. Postscript
There's some, maybe, who've been perusing
These biting lines, find them amusing,
But hardly what you'd call objective -
Rather jaundiced, too selective,
The work of a man with an axe to grind,
Or some deep personal grudge in mind,
Working up a one-off crime
Into a kind of paradigm
For the social scheme of things entire:
Of course this cloak-'n-dagger bunch
Are dire, but when it comes to the crunch
There's one sure thing that will resist 'em -
The British Parliamentary System!
That bulwark, that well-founded wall,
Will take the strain should all else fall.
This poet's making, in his fury,
Mountains out of molehills, surely.
Molehills! Exactly - There's my cue
To prove that what I'm saying is true.
My advice is, have a look
At Spycatcher, that Naughty Book,
Banished by Mag because it took
The lid right off the Secret World
Wherein the Whitehall Moles lie curled,
Giving them all an awful fright,
For, as you know, moles fear the light,
Especially if it's shed by one
Who's been a Mole himself, old son.
And this one spilled the beans all right,
Relating how, in gleeful malice,
They undermined Westminster Palace,
Plotting, with treasonous intent,
The 'collapse' of a Labour Government.
A molehill under the Sovereign Commons! -
What price now your famous bombings
By Guy Fawkes or the IRA?
The Moles outblast them any day!
The bulwark of the Constitution?
These tools of 'counter-revolution'
Have no more awe for the hallowed House
Than the cat has for a half-dead mouse.
So much for the depths of the affair,
But I am loath to leave you there.
There's nothing like a little uplift
To close a tale, so I'll end up with -
Sorry about that awful rhyme,
But we are running out of time -
So I'll end up, let me repeat,
With a jump of umpteen thousand feet -
U.S. warplanes, yahoo-driven,
Scouring the blue fields of heaven,
Seeking a pretext for provocation
Against some little, libeled nation,
And, sighting at several miles range,
Two Libyan jets (was that not strange?)
Shot them out of the sunlit morning,
With never a sign, or a word of warning.
The two made threatening moves, they said,
(Like flying over the US Med?),
And judging their own lives in danger,
They shot in self-defence, not anger .
Ah, Yeats, you were wrong;
Climbing and climbing in a widening gyre,
The falcon still obeys the falconer.
Things fall apart, but still the centre holds,
And still will hold while your lamented pact
Of master and minion stays intact.
Break this, tear these apart, and then
We'll make our martyred planet whole again.
©Renate Mitchell.
May not be reproduced in any form online
or offline without explicit written permission.
