My body mostly water
now I remember that stream
Exmoor red bed boulders
intervals in its falling music
filling my Camden ears
locked limbs to flow with it
and so to heal my heart
whose systole/diastole
these two loved places are
in Britain – one pastoral
retreat, the sacred wood,
a natural baptism,
the other dusty familiar
full of faces
meeting of possibility
for pillars of gold metamorphosis,
speaking to each other
the beautiful city.
And the rain falls
on the just and the unjust
in its bounty.
No, the land is cursed,
the body politic
despised and neglected.
Now that soft grey cloud
the common good
becomes the start of a billion pound
production line. It is sold
as well as our soil, minerals,
energy, skills, telecommunications,
for private profit called
plc but cynically
not for the public.
Citizens have queued at standpipes
for what they feared was contaminated.
The very act of selling it
already slips in poison
and our bodies mostly
built of it. Sold. Fools' gold.
Unhope. Land of my heart
we are unclean, we stink.
What skylark water will wash our body?
Sweet heaven
what shall we drink?