You might see from the aisle

the price stickers exposed

on the soles: mine, outsized,

were a man’s black brogues

from Eastwoods’ latest fire sale.

All ceremony is a hoax:

in bandit country the blackface

and cheviot, damp-fleeced, raddled,

wander unaware of entering

and exiting those great stone rings

archaeologists uncover, and claim

are like enough memorial.

Charm for Unfruitful Land

Eastward I stand and favours entreat.

I call the illustrious ones to yield;

the earth I beseech and each

of her keepers I summon to the field;

Mary, Christ, the blessèd Lord,

into your ears this glamour I pour.

From the teeth I speak each word.

Erce! Erce! Our Earth-Mother

let crops crop, let seeds seed,

and your yields yield to me. Let God

and every saint in heaven grant

my acres fortified against all slant

adversaries, their foul goetic means,

the demonry, the one-eyed spite,

all sortilege and jealousy

abroad like torches in the night:

I pray to Him who made this place,

no woman deft in conjuration

or man adept in talk and cunning

may halt the words I here unloose.

I praise the earth, the turf I hail,

the silt I stirred up I applaud;

the sod, the clod, the dirt, the soil,

the loam and clay I dig I laud,

I praise the use we put its fruits to,

commend provender, vittles, vivers,

whatever’s lowered in on hooks to

cure and darken in the smokehouse,

whatever’s threshed or dried or milled,

whatever’s plucked or picked or caught,

whatever’s raw or boiled or killed,

I drink, I eat, I smoke, I snort.

from the Anglo-Saxon

Grace and the Chilcot Inquiry

My daughter’s two weeks old tonight

and my wife wants me to talk to her more

so I started to explain how the answer

I did the thing I thought was right

was enthymematic, and meant to obscure

another rather major conjecture viz.

I do the thing I think it right to do.

Her slow blinks mean that in democracies

the leader’s not allowed to operate

according solely to what he or she decrees

is just or necessary; and my brand new

constituent looked appropriately cross

when I began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’

to the tune ‘The Sash My Father Wore’.

The Wonder

If the psalm house be possessed by saints, there would not come within the walls a man like enough to Magnus, bishop of here and all the north; a giant of holy innocence, the turtledove of charity, the wolfhound of courage and a casket of God’s wisdom. A great wonder was wrought on the night he was taken – the land was a-blaze from the fall of Nocturn to the first call of the cock: a mass of fire-clouds arose and went west, and everyone a-woke and rose. Some say it never happened. Or that it was like that only by the sea, in the east, for a second. A week went past and the farmer MacGregor, son of the sister of Magnus, was found suffocated in a cave. We watched the bloody flux; mortalities. A feast. The great murrain of cows.