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Best Poems Written by Richard Grenville

Below are the all-time best Richard Grenville poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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The Darkness Drops Again

It seems as though the world is shutting down,
Things happening that simply don’t compute.
The present curdles, turns a sepia brown.
Current affairs – a tree with rotten fruit.
The nineteen thirties seem to rise again
But through a looking glass where left is right,
And cowards gag the obvious refrain:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
William Butler Yeats, obsessed with gyres,
Miscalculated by a few decades,
Nor did his slouching beast conspire with liars.
But prophesy shines bright before it fades
On those whose lives the years will not condemn,
Who fight for more than just Jerusalem.

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Look Back In Anger to June 2024

Look Back in Anger to June 2024

You, current denizen of Number Ten
With gleaming Colgate smile and Gucci shoes,
Take serious pause for thought, reflect on when
The voters all reject you and you lose.

Your pledges, that you bravely, rashly, made – 
They will return to haunt you all too soon.
Your nemesis will come, will not be stayed;
Your wish is like a child’s who wants the moon.

You think it is enough to pass a law
To still your party’s fractious warring faction.
Your judgement is so pitifully poor
You confuse empty promises with action.

The cards are stacked against you, you’re misled,
Mistaken. Constant cabinet reshuffles 
Are futile: all the decent ones have fled
And you are left with piglets snouting truffles.

So now you balance on the very brink
Of the event horizon of the blackest hole
In which you’ll vanish, sooner than you think.
And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

***************************************

The petit levée was when Corbyn rose
But he was premature and showed their hand.
He frightened sympathetic ‘I don’t knows’
Who wanted something just a tad more bland.

Then for the Labour party in distress
Rode up a noble knight in shining armour,
An answer to their prayers, more or less:
Not Lancelot or Sir Gawain, but Starmer,
A stuffed shirt with a rictus, pained expression,
Inspiring as a quarter-pound of lard.
Forgive me if I give the wrong impression
But to be complimentary’s rather hard.

Now Labour’s grand levée takes centre stage.
With vacuous platitudes the press are fêting
A diverse, inclusive, globalist new age.
I’m horrified by our P M in waiting.

Details | Richard Grenville Poem

Those Whom the Gods Destroy

In days gone by, when people lost their minds
They used to say the time is out of joint,
It is a discord in the spheres that blinds
Our natural reason, makes us miss the point;
The movements of the planets and the stars
Are interrupted by some meteor,
Or Earth and Venus misalign with Mars,
Causing plague and pestilence and war.

These seem to be just as convincing reasons
As any that a rational man can find
For such elite establishment malfeasance
That drives societies en masse to lose their mind.

Those whom the gods destroy they first make mad
And goad them to tear down the best they had.

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Look In Their Eyes

Look in their Eyes

Who do you believe? Look in their eyes.
Is there the gleam of zealot or fanatic,
Or opposition to a pack of lies?
Do you see a sane man or a lunatic?

Do you hear the bluster of a liar
Who thinks by talking big he will seem strong
But only manages to stoke the fire
By saying what we know is right, is wrong?

Or do you see a man of strong belief,
A man of honesty and selfless principle,
Whose freedom would be stolen by a thief
Whose hubris makes him think himself invincible?

The day of judgement comes, the future’s beckoning;
We’re hurtling headlong to a day of reckoning.

Details | Richard Grenville Poem

The Man In The Street

The Man in the Street

Watch out, watch out for the man in the street
Who is finding a voice that you don’t want to hear.
Before, they were always the sheep that don’t bleat
And for too long, too long, you have turned a deaf ear.

The man in the street is finding a voice
And if you don’t sit up, take notice and listen
Your world will be hit by the force of his choice
Like a violent outburst of nuclear fission.

For too long, too long, the ruling elite
Have looked down averted and myopic noses.
They’ve taken for granted the man in the street
And this time they won’t come up smelling of roses.

It might take a while, things take time to grow,
But sprouting young acorns will turn into oaks.
The man in the street is getting to know
That your claims to democracy are just a hoax.

Because even if you have the best of intention
The Office for This and the Qango for That
Are minefields that exercise powers of prevention
To ensure even mildest reforms all fall flat.

You promise us this and you promise us that,
We vote in good faith but, whoever should win,
We might as well pull a name out of a hat.
Your fine manifesto goes straight in the bin

And you do things that you never told us about,
That you kept under wraps and didn’t reveal
And bind us with laws we’d be better without
And give us no chance to object or appeal.

But the man in the street has woken at last,
His silent consent is a thing of the past.
His apathy’s gone, he is finding his feet;
Watch out, watch out for the man in the street.

Details | Richard Grenville Poem

A Stone Alone?

My anger grips my heart with hands of ice;
Cold fury makes my brow burn and perspire.
The things of value, things that have no price
Are being trashed and thrown into the fire.
False promises are being made by liars
Who know full well they set out to deceive,
To drag those who speak sense into the mire,
While persecuting those who still believe
That history is not a leaking sieve,
That some things are still solid as the rock
Of ages that we cannot, must not, leave
Or we will put our legacy in hock.
A mountainside is more than just one stone;
Show me, mountain, that I’m not alone.

Details | Richard Grenville Poem

Too Late

Too Late

When we have all been made to feel ashamed
Of what our fathers and their forebears did;
When we have lost a knowledge of the past
And cannot comprehend how people thought,
Believing them inferior to us,
Judged by the latest fashions of today;
When we have lost the wisdom of the Greeks
And cannot see ourselves in Shakespeare’s plays;
When fear comes out in cities after dark 
(Police patrol the media, not the streets);
When we cannot utter what we think
And barely even have the power of thought
Since words have been corrupted, lost their meaning;
When inclusivity has brought division;
When diversity applies to race
But never, never, to opinion;
When comedy is banned (it might offend)
And satire’s dead (it’s simply real life);
When pronouns masquerade in place of nouns
And hide the truth of what we really are;
When currency is digital and controlled
Like pocket money for compliant children;
When we are trapped in fifteen-minute towns
And fined and charged for driving anywhere;
When only thistles grow on grazing land
And all we have to eat is bugs and seaweed;
When we relinquish power to global qangos,
Self-appointed rulers of the world
That none of us elected nor asked for;
Then it will be too late to weep and wail.
Sheep at the slaughter bleat to no avail.

Details | Richard Grenville Poem

Lessons From History

Lessons From History

When Hitler was voted into power
He scraped in (voting was a shambles),
But he knew it had come, this was his hour,
And so he took one of his biggest gambles.

He knew his grip on power was paper thin
And so decided he would take a flier;
He gambled everything that he would win,
So struck a match and lit the Reichstag fire.

He blamed it squarely on the other side,
The ostensible excuse he needed.
He silenced everyone who said he lied:
Head gardener in a garden that he seeded
With such a rank and rotten infestation
It killed, corrupted and destroyed a nation.

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When we have all gone mad

When we have all gone mad and lost our reason
And turned into dumb, blind, compliant sheep
And no-one’s left with sense to see the treason
That was wrought on us while we were fast asleep;
When history’s been lost and no-one knows
From whence we came, or even where we are,
And we are left, like winter’s battered rose
Directionless, beneath our wandering star;
Then it will be too late, too late to learn.
The textbooks will have gone, all been taken,
Thrown on the fires of darkness, all to burn:
The wisdom of millennia, all forsaken.
Then what the prophet said will come to pass:
We will have disappeared up our own arse.

Details | Richard Grenville Poem

We Will Fight

Why are they so devoid of common sense?
What arrogance to take us all for fools!
They think that they are safe behind their fence
And we’ll submit, without a fight, to rules
They choose to bind us with to pin us down,
Deny our right to make our own decision.
They listen to the city, not the town
And treat the country-dwellers with derision.
But what, through vanity, they fail to see
– their eyes and ears are high above the ground – 
Is that the people (likes of you and me)
See what they don’t see, something more profound.
If we wake up we can tell wrong from right.
When pushed into a corner, we will fight.