Stories
about bombs have punctuated my life.
Born when
the welfare state was also a baby;
I heard
about my dad firewatching on the roof
Of an art
school in blitzed London,
And composing
an oil painting whilst he was up there.
I heard
about the shrapnel,
Still embedded
in an aunt’s leg.
And, every
so often, a radio announcer might report
Unexploded ordinance,
found buried on a building site.
One day,
Cuba was in the news,
Nikita Khrushchev
banged his shoe on a desk at the UN,
That was the
first time that I saw my father scared.
Made to be a
school boy cadet,
The worst
bomb I heard was a thunderflash,
Just
oversized fireworks,
Thrown about
by boys in pretend wars;
Whilst half
a world away,
Youths threw
real grenades at each other
In Vietnam.
But London
learned the hard way
That old wounds
don’t always heal,
As propaganda
of the deed reminded us,
Of an
unjustly held colony,
Kept down by
British army boots
Across a
narrow sea.
A bandstand
blew up,
A cast iron
waste bin disintegrated in a high street, killing a child.
Sudden night
blasts outside Territorial Army barracks;
And then,
after a general election,
I heard a
massive dull thud roll up from the Thames valley,
To my suburban
hilltop,
As a debt
was repaid in the City.
Not content
with that,
The Fenians
blew me out of bed,
Where I lay
drunk, trying to forget
The start of
four more Tory years,
As, three
quarters of a mile away
A four-lane flyover
was lifted off its foundations,
By an
exploding van.
A truce came
to London, until Jihad began
Old wounds
don’t always heal,
Crusades and
colonialism festered,
And oil was
not a balm,
For those
treacherous treaties, Sykes-Picot, Balfour
And all the other
dodgy dealing,
Spooking and
conniving,
To keep
those motors running.
But the
truth could be that
It doesn’t
worry me more
Than the chance
of dying in traffic accident.
Stupidity seems
to breed Stupidity,
Just today
the world’s prize-winning stupidest man
Addressed the
UN to threaten a nation
With total
destruction.
I wish,
because it’s all I can do,
is wish
That he’d
taken off his shoe,
Like Nikita Khrushchev
did, but then
Beat himself
with it,
Over his
dyed blond head.
