Behemoth
So you broke faith?
Melted down in the crucible
of Hampton Court’s
maze? Saw Daedalus
rise as a comet over the
English Channel again?
Lost Ariadne’s thread
when paparazzi pursued
to regal carnage within
a Parisian subterrane
underpass? And for the
rest: to be lost only in
fable of Albion’s fiddled
almanacs, paybacks from
manipulating the Raj’s
principalities; prejudices
surfacing still like apocalypse
from beaches of Dunkirk
with Churchillian grandiosity:
a black smoke-column still
unfurling like vast behemoth,
pages of an inextinguishable
sulfur…
.
.
Leviathan
Triumphal forced entry into
Londinium: calvalcade upon
cavalcade of the lockjaws;
arms implicitly sold to Saudi,
poppy upon impregnable poppy:
moat around Tower Hill foams
its gobbets of innocuous bloodlust.
Two billion more for Britannia’s
nuclear hoop-skirt, as she sashays
with her trident-on-credit:
a skirling maiden-hoplite within
mordant Leviathan’s mortally
coiled slow dance, uncoiling
ever more slowly…
.
.
Mark Wilson
Art: Walter Nessler, ‘Premonition’ (1937)