For the New Republic(s)

Issue 

For the New Republic(s)

em = By Linda Martin

The right wing and its apologists

(I do not count myself amongst them

unless stranded on the fence)

admired Mrs Thatcher's strength
Who else they say

could mend the tears in imperialism's armoury

or set to right accounts

rubbed raw by an undeserving poor?
A country too old, too complacent

to squarely face

a commercial fate,

or to thrive in its embrace,

was obstructed in its modernising task,

tied to its past and ancient constitution

a later source of major disillusion
The accepted and "divine" unstated

seal of monarchy

could not be challenged

or its fall anticipated
But some

fine, but undeserving few

doleful, soulful emigrés like me

dismembered, unremembered inter-generational amputees

born of ancestral wanderlust and gratuitous cannon balls

got cut off, frustrated

abandoned, neo-nated

an ungodly and dispirited lot

who tried to bury ancient wounds in English garden plots
Comfortably we settled down

to cultivate our barren apathetic lands

accepting ill-considered imperial direction

Till now we stand to face a greater insurrection
A new self-consciousness

with common soul now rightly seen as peer

will utter forth

from within, and yet beyond Westminster's "sacred" halls

to liberate

but first, appall.

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