Lay for the Day3rd May

1926: the beginning of the General Strike, the strongest showing of workers’ solidarity in British history.

1979: the Conservatives win a landslide victory in the General Election that marks the beginning of 18 years of Tory rule for Britain. After a few years it felt like this:

Eye City [an extract]

Spliff booze & powders
Spliff booze & powders
Can’t you play any
Louder?
Play some blues.

Clit tits & nates
Clit tits & nates
Come out to play in
The 80s,
In the sand-pit.

Many faces made familiar with love’s
Shortage, cocktails raised
In places made similar through spiritual wastage,
Dimness and indirection of the light,
Cash flow and fun with elastic
Inhibition…

Would you be wise in bars and beware
That strange girl’s beauty you’re watching
Whisper in your brother’s ear, tenderness
You’d spy out under her adornment?
Cause every he in here’s seen her,
Mummy-lovers, sugar-daddies, hard boys,
That she’s a shape-shaker, hunger-tonguer.

* * * *

When one who weeps will walk the streets,
When the superior man asks that his tower fall on him
And the wise woman her mirror and her thread to hide her,
Pity the fool, petty, proud and poor,
Who believes in this world and says,
Bless the harlot and the violent that they would be healers;
It’s behave or be saved if the next wave’s the last;
Though everyone’s saying it’s a small world,
Really there’s just a big God.

* * * *

Comfort to one afflicted is the transformation of the earth
And Messiah a loving act.
A fit object for devotion is the son of man made hideous
By the torments of a sinful generation,
Not for the contemplation of fault
But that the glory of God be made manifest in the healing.

* * * *

Suddenly a black vaporous tide rushes upon the full moon
And engulfs it. The perfect lesser light completely vanishes
As it had never been, but soon shines again un-vanquished, at which
The clouds, brows beaten by her gentle light, bulk under a new head
And mount broad-winged against it, till the simple disc reveals in time
The assailant unsubstantial, beaming from fissures and chasms
Her splendour. This play it seems theyÕll play all night, while our desolate
Sister rises high, obsolete and small as a silver threepence.

John Gibbens, from Collected Poems

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