Performances of collective and individual vision and skill;
Living values of discipline, humility, workrate and teamwork;
Demonstrating outstanding defence and brilliant finishing;
Manifesting in public displays of dominance through excellence and victory through harmony.
Steps on a journey, creating points of pressure passing through
sediment and silt or vulcan fire and shifting plates; events
condensed to pebbles in a flow – not drops caught in the air,
nor crystals in a bed; labelled with identity, pocketed
or panniered as dumb reminders, random scraps,
collected fragments of dry fallout from life’s accidents;
weights to ballast, or to slow progress, or to cast aside:
to trail behind, spill randomly, or pile and heap,
or lay in patterns (circles / spirals / chequered squares);
They had been glaciered mountains, then tumbled
boulders and frost-hammered rocks, now small-ground
mill-grist smothering in settling flakes of drifting chaff:
Water-polished smooth stones, oval-round
and ragged flints, sharp and freshly scraped
and sandstone lumps, crumbling down to dust
and slate sliced thin in quarrying, mournful grey
and darker than the shining speckled granite cores
and mixed-in dull lead musket shot, long spent
and shards of coloured glass, sanded rubbed and worn
and broken seashells, once shelter for forgotten
fluid bi-valve lives, lived in salt along a littoral;
All solid objects linked to hazy memories,
lightly touched, felt heavily and of uncertain worth –
singly, or assembled, or amassed in grams and pounds.
You!! The insidiously ungrateful guest
who turned on then attacked your host,
who treated what you’d asked for with contempt,
Who damaged our identities as the choices
we could make were ground between our pasts,
nuances and depths and caring crushed, diminished;
And blindly I replied in kind, in spades, in malice:
cold and stern, in fierce revenge I withdrew
kindness and threw you homeless on the street.
From a paradox of weakness I emulated strength:
the half-remembered sons of steel, working without sleep
in true collective effort, endurance and propaganda,
Disregarding norms to put the issue beyond doubt;
so I made sure to twist the knife of money and control –
to carve a breach, to dig for more, to build a wall;
Because I’d have you back, if only you would ask,
I made that ask impossible: I struck out in pride
and acted first, to maximise the distance and the hurt,
Leaving you adrift and me to face the fate I’d earned:
a melancholy seam no miner’s pick or drill can work
and a toxic firebreak cleared against compassion.
Maintain the Advance! 