Nor did I deem your decrees so strong
That you, a mortal man, could overturn
The gods’ unwritten and unfailing laws.
— Sophocles, Antigone, c. 441 B.C.
Back again, but for how long
In this brief respite from incarceration?
Air and sea now banned to us
By an Iron Curtain of regulations,
Locked in a land abandoned
To the Health-and-Safety Inquisition.
In punishment for what crime
Have these Furies of our madness descended?
In what still unburied corpse
Do these sickly flowers for the dead flourish?
From what accumulation
Of convenience sprung this generation?
History’s angel repeats:
Dictatorships have never been inflicted.
They are always a willing
Collusion of capital, state and people;
All memory deleted
For the promise of rewarded indifference.
The sheep that patiently queued
In the shearing shed’s all-night, fast-track check-in,
Emit no sound of protest
On this, their lorry-load’s final journey,
And the dog chained to the wall
Licks the farmer’s fist the following morning.
Like the blade of a guillotine
Through the sun of this long dishonest day,
A rising red horizon
Has severed us from all our former futures,
And yesterday’s freedoms lie
Within the shadow of a world now ended.
But this we must learn to know,
As we know in which hand to wield a weapon:
What’s stolen is never returned
By those we’ve handed the keys to our prison,
But with our own courage won
On the long battlefield of our resistance.
In the shade of this Alder tree
I’d gladly lie in quiet obscurity,
But in collaboration
With fear there’s only one side to this country,
And tomorrow calls me home
And long defeat to our common enemy.
— in memoriam Brian Taylor
Simon Elmer, from his book, Fight and Flight: Poems, 2012-2023, which is available in paperback. Please click on the link for the contents page, preface and purchase options.
More political poems by the same author:
The Unlawful Killing of Ian Tomlinson
A Communist in Hong Kong 
2 thoughts on “Freedom Day”