RIOT BRIGADE
Flashed all their truncheons bare
Flashed as they turned in air
Cracking hell’s-grannies there
Dare not a liberal spared
All the world wondered.
Plunged in the tear-gas smoke
Right through the gates they broke
Press-hounds and puppies
Admiring the backhand stroke
Thrashing and thundered.
Points make prizes, praise
The first man to six hundred!
Hippies to the right of them
Hippies to the left of them
Horses behind them
Volleyed and thundered.
Rubber-bullets, shot and shell
Not a horse or hero fell
They that had fought so well.
Each rozzer-filth counts the points
Of broken skulls, legs and joints
Top shot will scoop the prize
Of points to six hundred.
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Treble overtime paid
To each of the Riot Brigade
A wedge of six hundred! [2018]
[From the play The Wrong ’Un]
[cf. Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred Tennyson]
HOUSE
I leant upon a high stone ledge
When stale summer turned prison-grey
Fresh breaking bars of house music
I knew t’was here to stay. [2011]
[cf. Hardy’s A Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.]