Poetry

The New Vision of Piers Plowless

Ho Piers, Peterkin, you hover on the edge
of our consciousness as I follow your footsteps
living in London and on London as you did
or rather your maker that Long Will with Kit
his wife on Cornhill, exercising his trade
not willing to dig or delve, as poets still
demand the right to write. But I can’t say
services for bread, only offer my words
propped up by day jobs, like Chaucer, ambassador
for whichever king, wheedling his way to kickstart
English Lit, while you my dear gave what?
Blessings for a groat, counsel, shrivings, masses?
Never mind Will (if your bones can) though he’s
on syllabus, you’re there too, no courtier, just
versing the way of the world and now we need you
again. Those ills, greed and lust, ride high once more
roughshod, and where’s your Piers to stay them?
Will he come if I invoke him, dropping
his holy shift, attuned to our more sumptuous
secular times? I can show him a world so like
his own he’ll say, ‘Has nothing changed? Is all
I said before been so much smoke, no fire in
the belly to burn away the dross but inky
parchment bonds and blots? Should I die
proclaiming it? And England’s green and pleasant
land with playing fields housed over, ’the whole boiling
bricked in’ as one of your unwilling successors
said, and those poor you saw not singing anymore
at the pub but out for a furtive shot on the corner
that’s cheaper;. Did you think it would all change
as we did post our war, with your words? Remember
as the man said, ‘Poetry, art, makes nothing happen’.
Yet we try, banging our heads against our keyboards
now, crying, ‘We’re all still here in the field
full of folk and you, wherever you are, call us
to till your half-acre, meaning bend our backs
to whatever seems a straight furrow.’

‘What can you do?’ Reason asked you and asks us still.
And I would answer:’I can write,’ as you said
you could pray, not knowing your words would be
echoing still a millennium on. So to that fair field
of folk. Survey it. Has much changed? There’s binge
drinking as yours sat and sang, and lager for ale.
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Lady Meed

And Lady Meed? Oh she still rides out clad in bankers’
bonuses, except we’re the asses to carry their load.
And the poor who are with us always? We’ve hardened
our hearts towards them, bidding them take up
your challenge to dig and delve and labour according
to their talents, with the halt, the lame and the blind.
Would you ask us Peterkin to whip them into shape ?
No, you would have had compassion as some still do
even if they don’t share that Christ who taught you
to care. But Lady Meed, now there’s an immortal.
You’ll know her though she’s dressed in the paper
rags that hide her gold -hardened heart, cold as milled
steel that can’t be pierced by cries of poverty and need.
No contriteness cloaks her for plunging us into the dark
with the poorest to bear her burden on bent backs
while she tramples them underfoot. I see them stream
as in Blake’s darkest dream over London Bridge:
women with baby at breast and toddler at hand
bag ladies, doorway dossers, my window cleaner
widows who drudge for others, those at fifty
‘let go’, now joined by every walk and age
and colour, scholars in flapping gowns, pin-striped
bureaucrats, who never thought the axe could fall
on them, cry out in pain, while those more used
to Lady Fortune’s frown just grit their teeth.
Past gherkin and towering glass and steel they stream
holding their hands up against the bitter sky
while statesmen sum and subtract and politicians
probe lives they know nothing of, safe in their
seats padded with Daddy’s money or the firm
to bail them out. Sequestered since childhood
in cushioned enclaves they come in the train
of Lady Meed, straddling their high horses
to admonish us:’ Carve up nothing into smaller bites
to fill the belly.’ And no one comes to harrow this
hell and lead us into the light, no one to heal
our sick and raise our dead, touch lepers of mind
or body, suffer the children with free milk and meals.
Get us to share our broken bread and fish. Instead
we’re set against each other, sister on sister
whose skin’s a different colour but I was taught
‘The world’s my country’. You didn’t have this
problem, Piers, of a world on the move. How would
You have dealt if the Ottoman came to your door?

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The Muses

Now see as in a nightmare by Fuseli out of Blake
or Gilray and Hogarth rolled up in one: Britannia
devouring her children: clerks in black suits, Slasher
Trimmer and Cut, steel points poised above notepads
going their rounds. A group of girls, nine, danced
in a stately ring.. ‘Now susidy sluts go off, stack
shelves, pick fruit. You there Terpsichore, put on
these smart red shoes embroidered with pain
and grief. What’s that? Too small! Cut off your toes.
They’ll dance you til you drop. Euterpe, now
what’s all that noise ? We’ll dock your strings
and have some quiet here so we can hear the chink
of banker’s bonuses. You want for cash? Ask them.
See if they’ll fund your squawkings. And you
Melpomene, what do you do to keep yourself
but pander to the worst with tales of blood and lust.
Erato, Polyhymnia and Calliope: what three
to do one job, scribble a few lines for idle girls.
We don’t need History, Clio. We live in modern
times. Star gazing Urania? Where’s the call for that?
What ends does it serve now? What profits return?
So on they went til only Thalia was left
working the stand-up circuit in half empty pubs
where Sorrow drowns in lager swills until she
staggers out, falls in the gutter and there’s
no ‘A and E’ to take her in.

Then on again in glee went Slasher, Trimmer, Cut
chanting ‘We are the Treasury Boys; we come
to trim your fat,’ past shuttered libraries, dark stages
silent concert halls and emptied galleries
where once the nation’s pictures hung, flogged off
to sink the debt. So up and down they run
exhorting us to labour at broken weaving looms
in shuttered mines where the grass grows over
abandoned slagheaps, shipyards where work dry
docked, steel mills whose fires went out, all trades
exported off to cheaper hands and Gaunt’s harsh
prophesies come home to roost bound up in mergers
contracts of unemployment, outsourcings
and Hypocrite weeps :‘So sorry to let you go.’
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Piers Plowless

The Muses turned to Piers who shook has head.
‘There’s nothing I can do. I’m Piers Jobseeker now.
My land’s sold off for gated second homes since
what we eat comes mainly from abroad. Farming’s
an industry for agribis not yeoman smallholders
like me. Even the poor cows can’t lactate fast
enough to earn their keep. ‘Surely, ‘ they cried
‘You’ve fields of strawberries or apples we could
gather, just as the axemen said. ‘The pickers
come each year as once we gathered hops.
They’re used to it. They sleep in dormitories
or caravans for a pittance and their board.
No mortgages to pay or kids to school. Then
it’s back home where pounds notch up more
than their native euros. You couldn’t keep it up
hour after hour filling a thousand punnets.
Your backs would crack, your hands aren’t swift
and tough but fashioned to other work where
your skills can highlight truth and beauty
to other lives. Melpomene struck her breast.
then rich men’s toys, players for patrons, dubbed
elitist through no choice of our own. I will resist!’
But sweetvoiced Euterpe gave tongue. ‘What choice
have we; even caged birds sing?’ With drooping
heads they drift away, and when I look again
even Peterkin is gone, sucked into the throng
on London Bridge with now another 150,000 strong
or weak and more each day, far as the eye can see
their shuffling feet, like Wasteland dead undone
can scarcely rock the bridge so slow they move
each pressed against her neighbour. But then comes
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Flatterer

Flatterer the mouthpiece, to gull the people
with fear and oily praises, calling them salt
of the earth who will rescue the land as their fathers
did before them, tightening their belts til all
acquiesce in their chains of poverty, hunger
conning them with promises of a common pain
freemen become slaves to bonds and bankruptcy
hedge-funded about with a maze not of their making.

Jerusalem Fallen

And where is our Piers who can set all to rights?
where should we search for him? Among the brash
young hopefuls with their management speak, or
look up to the moneymen and abandon the poor?
Who’ll build us Jerusalem? But nobody answers
out of the crowd of fearful self-seekers. Until
suddenly, weeping, Piers pushes forward, snaps
his shining arrows of desire in two, unstrings
his golden bow , hurling his spear at the sun
as darkness descends. And I awake in Fulham
and take up my pen to follow in your tracks.

13-09-2010

Copyright Maureen Duffy 2010

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Lyrics for the Dog Hour (poems) (1968)

New Short Plays: No. 2 (1969)

Venus Touch (poems) (1971)

Evesong (poems) (1975)

Memorials of the Quick and the Dead (poems) (1979)

Collected Poems, 1949-84 (poems) (1985)

Pool: New Fiction from Liverpool John Moores University (2001)

Family Values

Publication September 1st from Enitharmon Press
over forty new poems. pp 62 (£8.55)
'These are tough poems, full of love and harm, good and damage, rage and compassion.'
David Constantine.

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