Green Hills of Poets Past

You say words of your environment

Poet of the past

Were you a poet of the last?

The last of men to see the sun breakover the Foleshill

Or the last of men to lie by the water filled with the memories of better days

For where I live none of this was clear

There was no sun for me to appear

The waters edge dirty, crass and rude

Stinking and grubby, the stench of a dead cats brood

Thrown to waste and suppressed by greys

The canal edge swoons and frays

I wonder how you would see this?

Master of all words

I wonder what amazing things you could say about the passing turds

Or carrier bags, broken bottles and empty beer cans

I wonder how you might play with words

The shopping trolley being offered up as if by the lady of a lake

But that offering is a fake, the rattling tail of a snake

That lady is not so, a witch by any standard

Infesting cleanliness with bacterial growth

It’s the same from London all the way to Arbroath

You can smell it as you stand close

But that’s nowhere in your old prose

You sing of breezes passing through trees

sunlight dancing through the leaves

I have to leave my home to see some green

And once I do it seems obscene

Because even though it all looks green

I see man

cold and clean

Englands glorious rolling hills

Says nothing to me except of its ills

As loving land is split and cracked

With green laden grids placed o’er top

At some stage its head must have been lopped

Because what I see is not nature

But a land broke to your favour

Yours to devour to excess

You forgot the land was as your mothers breast

For as you scoffed and grappled it out

She never let off a whimper or shout

You took it all and left no doubt

That your industrial needs were more important

So now the chance has come and gone

It looks as though we are past hoping

The charms you sung in your sweet song

Today have no bearing

Just the never ever ending grey

And nothing but for the city to say

“Where have the green hills gone?”