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The Setting of the Sun: Part Two

Tommy Atkins was a good boy
grew to be a good man, good soldier,
packed up his troubles in an old kit bag and smiled
as his entrails blew out with aplomb;
he died as the black rain struck his slowly glazing eyes
good son, good husband, good father
left only good for fertilizing the Somme.
Damned carnage-strewn carnival
of barbed wire bisected mustard gas days;
how “great” was the great war,
how “great” was the harm
when old strategists cast generations of youth
into the stalemate jaws of trench warfare death
and all those young hopefuls who bought the dream
unwittingly bought the farm.
Two decades down the smouldering road,
up rolls Euro Death Circus
rolling out Four Horsemen and a Fascist regime insane;
now technology enhanced the butchery
with planes and tanks, boats and submarines
and all the young hopefuls bought the farm again.
Proudly she revels in her past glory,
wallowing and exalting, sucking rotten cold comfort
from the memorial corpse of a golden fleece;
learning nothing;
we’ll meet again, no doubt,
over the white cliffs of Dover
beneath Spitfire engine trails, perhaps;
for she may have won the war,
yet she has surely lost the peace.
A land once fit for heroes, warrior kings and demigods,
now freezes crippled and immobile
when the race into the future has begun;
in a pox of politically correct Fascism on one hand
and the real thing on the other,
where is the hand of reason to stop the fall of night,
stop the setting of the sun...?

Copyright © Tony Bush | Year Posted 2006

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