A Poem by John Medlin - Sorrowful tramp of boots on sanded streets

THE TRIUMPH OF ISLAM

“That England that was wont to conquer others

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”

(Richard II, 2:1, ll. 65-6)

Sorrowful tramp of boots on sanded streets:

In winter’s grey, sad companies of men

Manhandle Churchill’s coffin with dull beats

Of drum and growling brass. Grown men and children

Sag heads and make their peace, and St Pauls greets

The last of England, mourned in fen and glen:

The state he served, those thin wan faces tell,

Has hollowed like the booming, death-march bell.

Mere thirty years from Pericles’ repose

Refulgent Athens died in Sparta’s fist.

In Ludgate Hill foxish lawyers at their windows

Watched Churchill pass and since have ticked their list

Of state-upturning statutes which in prose

Have sundered epic: mealy “one-world” grist

Which Albion’s beaches ramped with unjust laws

Bringing the millioned umma to these shores.

That stocky soldiery, those weeping folk,

That stark January day, in thirty years

Fast shrivelled to an untamed tribe bespoke

On sink estates of pierced lips and ears,

Their pride as great-strength oxen at the yoke

Neutered by those lawyers’ brats whose fears

Of nation-love have brewed with other spawn

A curdled rainbow in a sullen dawn.

On Sundays Finsbury Park is loud with trade,

Hijab and djellaba command the scene,

A church where once the liturgy was prayed

Disgorges carpets of a Turkish sheen,

The mosques are brimming, that which kept the shade

Tide-like swamps suburbs with the muezzin’s keen;

Soon, time-old villages, deep-valleyed towns,

Will startle as that cold wave slaps and drowns.

The crop-rich fields and gorse-bedazzled moors

Enfold two thousand years of Christ-mens’ cells,

Those chapels, caves, where what’s eternal pours

Through being, fruitful as baptismal shells:

All lost; a rotted people slamming doors

Against its past must pander to the yells

Of ghazis who in church and manor halls

Gouge mihrabs in those age-encrusted walls.

April 2014

Note:

Umma – the worldwide Muslim “community.”

Ghazi – a Muslim warrior particularly one who fights against non-Muslims.

Mihrab – prayer niche showing the direction of Mecca.

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© April 2014

For more poems by John Medlin please see Medlin the Writer blog