A Very English Arcadia
(After 'The Mores' by John Clare, see below)

by Bob Beagrie

“For what you call the Law is but a club of the rich over the lowest of men, sanctifying the conquest of the earth by a few and making their theft the way of things.” - Gerrard Winstanley, 1652 

The green and pleasant countryside
of beautiful bone fields,
sacrificial pastures
of monocrops beyond the sign –
‘No Road Here’,
its obsession with fences, railings,
boundaries, grills, grids, markers,

an idyll beside the country
not in the country but adjacent
and flung far from whatever’s wild,
or accessible for roaming
or rambling by anything other
than mycelium,
sub-soil colonies of thread-like hyphae

as tho’ the very birds should learn to know
they must no further go

for, like the battle-scarred nobles
of féodalité, fief and feudom,
today’s rulers and hedgefunders
naturalise positions of entitlement,
ownership, pastoral views
of generational superiority, through titles,
hoarded wealth, inherited estates
and pass-me-down privilege –

singing brook waters dribble free
beneath The Devil’s Bridge
where we spot a dragonfly
drop Pooh sticks, bade bye-bye

yet unlike the blood-spattered progenitors
of their pedigree, who, in their might
and cold savagery carved England
into manageable plots, stuffed
the commons in their own pockets
through acts of enclosure,
                                    expulsions,
mass clearances          forced vagrancy,
the chinless wonders of refined tastes
carry no muscle memory of battle mayhem
relying on old writs, histories of legitimacy,
myths of divine right

a trinity of crows guard the track up to the moortop
beyond the creak of the kissing gate
like a pod of whales the clouds migrate –

On the evening news a billionaire MP’s
photo-op with a foodbank queue,
crocodile smile sweet as treacle,
and a borrowed Kia Rio
to promote an optic of a man you might know,

while they prize out your eyes,
make you pay through the nose,

One law for the poor and some plunder-dream
called lifestyle for the well-at-heel,
such unbounded freedoms only come with capital –

in little paddocks little minds to please
each little tyrant with his little sign,
a philistine slave with smothered sigh.

The Mores

by John Clare

Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky

One mighty flat undwarfed by bush and tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself, which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the horizon’s edge surrounds

Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all – a hope that blossomed free,
And hath been once, no more shall ever be

Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave
And memory’s pride ere want to wealth did bow
Is both the shadow and the substance now

The sheep and cows were free to range as then
Where change might prompt nor felt the bonds of men
Cows went and came, with evening morn and night,
To the wild pasture as their common right

And sheep, unfolded with the rising sun
Heard the swains shout and felt their freedom won
Tracked the red fallow field and heath and plain
Then met the brook and drank and roamed again
The brook that dribbled on as clear as glass
Beneath the roots they hid among the grass
While the glad shepherd traced their tracks along
Free as the lark and happy as her song

But now all’s fled and flats of many a dye
That seemed to lengthen with the following eye
Moors, loosing from the sight, far, smooth, and blea
Where swopt the plover in its pleasure free
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poet’s visions of life’s early day

Mulberry-bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and done

And hedgrow-briars – flower-lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower-pots – these are all destroyed
And sky-bound mores in mangled garbs are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft

Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease

Each little path that led its pleasant way
As sweet as morning leading night astray
Where little flowers bloomed round a varied host
That travel felt delighted to be lost

Nor grudged the steps that he had ta-en as vain
When right roads traced his journeys and again –
Nay, on a broken tree he’d sit awhile
To see the mores and fields and meadows smile

Sometimes with cowslaps smothered – then all white
With daiseys – then the summer’s splendid sight
Of cornfields crimson o’er the headache bloomd
Like splendid armys for the battle plumed
He gazed upon them with wild fancy’s eye
As fallen landscapes from an evening sky

These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go

Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name

All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams.

The three poems below are from a sequence of poems inspired by The Spanish Civil War and The International Brigade, which Bob Beagrie been working on for around four years now. It is now a 35 poem collection, Romanceros, and is due to be published next Spring by Drunk Muse Press, a radical Scottish publisher. Recently, Project Lono - Bob and a group of musicians) took eight of the poems from Romanceros and created a 20 minute long dramatic soundscpape of music, sound effects and spoken word recordings. You can hear it on the link below the poems, or here. 

Black Sheep

“…it was perfectly clear that if you really saw what
was happening, you felt you had to do something about it.”

- Noreen Branson
(from Angela Jackson’s British Women and the Spanish Civil War)

Grown among grim streets of mangled men
limbless, disfigured, shattered inside and out
like caricatures scribbled by children in crayon,
and the rooms of vacant chairs after Armistice,

they kicked against convention and decorum
refused to know their place, follow instruction
to ask no awkward questions to hear no lies,
but filled with indignation at the shameful state

of the nation, the scale of suffering, deprivation
in smog-laden, rickets-wrung towns and cities,
these rebel children, holy terrors, fiery particles -
libel to run-off, talk back, pick a different track,

flocked together under a new banner to bleat
then stampede, their hooves trampling teapots.

 
Passage
(for Otto Estensen & Tommy Chilvers)

i)

He plucks the strings of his mandolin
as the sun sinks behind the mountains,
his fingers play a bitter-sweet serenade
as deep blues thicken across the vale,
night drinks returns, sups up the trail,
the mandolin plays across the Pyrenees.
“ay dios mío, ay dios mío, ay dios mío.”

ii)

“Play us a tune for would-be heroes.”
Tommy tells him, beneath icicle stars.
“This is a tune for stars and shepherds.”
He says to pin the tune with a theme.
Both have come a long way from home
to try and lend a hand, to make a stand,
to shed sweat, tears, a drop of blood,
to sleep upon the soil of a foreign land.

iii)

He thrums the strings of the mandolin,
he lets a chord soar, drops the next low.
An owl argues through the cold clear air,
“Hunger teaches the heart how to care.”
Will care be enough against what waits?
What amasses upon each horizon line -
“ay dios mío, ay dios mío, ay dios mío.”

iv)

“Can a tune change the way things are?”
Otto asks, as his fingers stroke the strings,
the bottomless sea of the great night sky
sings along with a song of sovereignty,
the stars outshine the darkening peaks
viewed by two rascals on heaven’s crags?
“A tune can lead us to what we might be.”
Tommy Chilvers mutters with a shiver.

v)

“ay dios mío, ay dios mío, ay dios mío.”
The non-intervention patrols keep watch
for travelling rebels hell-bent for España,
secret passengers of the red express,
but the mandolin has lulled them to sleep,
the mountains snore, the chasms yawn,
the rogues slip through to call ¡NO PASARÁN!
The owl cries for the Republic's dream.

vi)

The tune runs out on the mandolin,
two friends cast away from the familiar
hunker into hollows for a chill night
both have no doubt that they’re right
in asking who they are prepared to be?
What they'll do in the name of democracy?
The narrow paths into Iberia are cloaked
in black and blue but the mandolin's tune
echoes back with hope, “ay dios mío”.

 
Vagabonds

‘We were an uneven lot, large and small, mostly young, hollow-
cheeked, ragged, pale, the sons of depressed and uneasy Europe’

- Laurie Lee – A Moment of War, 1991

Inconvenient on home turf with your unsavoury beliefs
but far from unloved. Invisible only
to those with titles and a seat at the table.

Unexpected, you came to offer your hand, to help
draw a line in the sand. Smuggled
over borders that turned a blind eye,

drawn to so much rawness in vineyards and olive groves
torn from the soft hands of gentlemen.

You composed anthems
for your blacklisted histories,
I recognise those tunes.

Snows melt on the Sierra. Battle lines
scribbled on archaic maps. The evenings full
of flambéed voices on radio broadcasts
from underground bunkers.

You lived afterwards and always
as Christ in the winepress
under a corpse-soiled shawl of suspicion.

IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE!

Plain and Simple

by Bob Beagrie

“The great who trod our fathers down,
Who steal our children’s bread,
Whose hands of greed are stretched to rob
The living and the dead.”

- A Rebel Song, James Connolly, 1903

They consider us fools because we went
to underfunded state schools

They think themselves superior based on
their self-perpetuating criteria

They smile for the media prank of a public
relations visit to a food bank

They label workers greedy because we
refuse to let our children go hungry

They protect the stolen commons behind
privately patrolled cordons

They believe they're unaccountable as if
the law was merely a fable

Their rules for correct living were written in
the raised welts of whippings

They strip away our rights as if we were
a separate race of troglodytes

Their upbringing of entitlement is based
on our ancestral belittlement

They plunder the nation’s wealth with
the impunities of power and stealth

They package themselves as celebrities
while building personal oligarchies

They heat private swimming pools while
our families shudder like ghouls

They spin a soundbite to show they care
as they dance to the tune of a billionaire

They’ll say whatever ‘the people’ want while
lining the pocket of a super-rich cunt.

We’re tired of being gaslighted, it’s time
their positions were dynamited.