When I were five, I wore a plastic sword
To make my fantasy of Shakie's 'Dick
The Turd', heroic tho' a villain, bored
Of bowing to lesser kings, cringing sick-
With-fancies sycophants to restraining
Realities. To change the sad bad world
Even then was my aim: rid of feigning
We would, I'd ensure it, red flag unfurled
Make level those peaks of false greedy pride
In monetary worth alone. Let's build
A new world: such people in it that wide
Open space of opportunity filled
Itself with love and joy and Dick the Turd
Himself resigned from power: universal
Freedom where each person's every word
Was truly bound to capital's dispersal.
Childish dreams behind us, we are alone
Now in opposition to rule of greed,
The quest of gold robs values of the bone
That sustained them.The good life gone to seed.
You look for succour to some greater mind
To find nothing but opposition can us bind.
This poem is silly enough, but it was prompted not only by WordPress but by coming across, as I sort my books a great poem dedicated to Hugh MacDiarmid by Sidney Goodsir Smith in a volume of poems dedicate tho the former poet on his 75th birthday, sill isolate – if no longer by madness and his Shetland Island once-retreat but rockily fortified in his Biggar bungalow. The poem is addressed to the poet in his true name Christopher M. Grieve and is called Perpetual Opposition, and is of course, with citations of Milton ‘in Scottish’ enough to prove it, committed like William Blake to the idea that Milton’s Satan provides us with the only way to address a world gone to evil seed.
Here’s the poem. It comes from an Akros publication dedicated to Hugh MacDiarmid on his seventy-fifth birthday (one year older than me now) signed by all the poets represented in it:
Divine discontent alane
Can justifie God's weys til men
- Tho beggars walk and tyrants ride
In beggars' hairts find freeman's pride!
-Mebbe!
Well that’s it- maybe!. But I much prefer Goodsir Smith’s Mebbe!.
With love
Steven xxxxx
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