Render unto Caesar

A letter, poems

This week I am grieving my dear aunt, and cannot write.

We’re on an in-between-essays week, so here are four things for you, sent with care, sadness and bursts of feral joy, all mixed up, as befits such violent times. There’s a somewhat ranting letter to a friend from 2022, plus three poems against tyranny and empire, inner and outer. Here, Boudica stands for a correct, noble, defence of lifeways, kin and land, even if doomed. I see echoes of St Wite.

See you next week, and thank you for all the calls, comments and emails after last week’s piece, I appreciate everyone who reached out with their own outlandish stories of transformation and unknowing.

Thalweg                                                        

2018-2023

The Valley Spirit is empty
the living midnight is black

no longer the river, nor the tide back-flowing
not the rolling brown waters, the ridged standing waves
nor the cormorants and their young overtaking the heron

but the valley floor, the muddy silty wide depression
the wave-scoured absence of the deep spiralling central channel
filled and emptied, treacherous, fugitive

how could it mind the tide?

or the tickling of visiting ships whose anchors, catching in the ooze, 
dislodged ancient swords so that the means by which Boudica 
stood up to Roman onslaught are laid bare

the inferior bronze weaponry of the heart -

ash handled, bound in rawhide cord
failed to withstand the iron gladius

but two thousand years later 
from the pregnant low tide line at Isleworth
was rebirthed the perfect leaf-shaped blade of the Iceni
from amongst the rusted fragments of later armaments

I cast my sword from hers many years ago
and shaped the handle then wrapped it
with twine of deer hide that I tanned
I shall be buried with it

as I rot, my rib cage will fall apart to reveal a new valley
into which the foliate metal will sink
where once beat my heart
now worms and moles will be
as at home in my body as I am now

I will arm the earth and defend her
my bones will seed the ground
my flesh will feed the creatures 
who will one day 
and for all time
overthrow the empire

Rome  

a letter, 2022

The Machine is 'Rome'. 

We are its slaves. 

The billionaires are the tyrants, (the Republic is over.)

The millionaires are the Senate. 

The internet is the system of roads, penetrating all lands. 

The satellites are the slave-powered galleys, the near-earth orbit is the ocean, carrying everything we could want, and the price is everything we once held dear.  

We are enslaved, we have lost our gods, forgotten our songs, abandoned our land, neglected friendships, reneged on reciprocity, as we enact colourless pastiches of our overlords' excessive lifestyles. 

Exactly like Rome. 

I feel sick. The net snapped shut. 

We did not build this particular and final empire. We created a machine to build it, and now we are 'all watched over by machines of loving grace'. ¹

Today, reading about the Britons’ last stand against the Roman invasion, I feel like I am looking down upon a perfect grid and it makes me want to retch. 

Nothing is wrong with me apart from a cold. I am fine. And when I speak of the small, wonderful things of life, they are true. I think you know it. Humans have mainly chosen the side of the Machine, at least the ones who run everything, and their acolytes. I feel like some Briton on Ynys Mon², waving my spear at the Empire come to kill me in the name of progress, knowing it'll be 400 yrs before there is any freedom again. And a thousand years after that, we ourselves enact empire just the same across a bitter ocean.

It is not just the humans this time, that the Machine is eating. That's the worst of it. It's all our living kin, right down to the good soil itself. 

At least my words, my love and my laughter are wild. I will not render these unto Caesar, they are not his!

---

Dance, dance                                                                      

April 2022 

Inherent in the two-step is the march
Implied in the three-step is the pause

I’ll choose the waltz over 
lock-step every time
Even if it takes me twice
as long to make my descent
and return

Dance, dance, even in 
the thick of fighting

Boudica and Muhammad Ali
both knew this

Conversion                                                                 

2018-2022

I awoke from factions at war
but now find the two sides at my table
drinking coffee and tapping their fingers
in a not-so-unfriendly manner
as though waiting for my assent -
to what?

all I want to do today 
is write poems

how can 26 letter forms 
and empty spaces
create a bridge
between the unknown in me
and the unknowable life of another?

the damsel fly who for 15 seconds alighted 
on my aluminium window edge
and interrupted that last verse
was a perfect form
which I instinctively understood

the war in me once raged 
there were ceasefires
and then a resumption of hostilities
but no more
today there is a subtle dialogue
humour, even
one tapper asks me:
‘When will you start really paying attention?’
the other chuckles:
‘It was not war, it was life.’

This week’s good thing: there is a woodpecker at work in the trees outside my window, the first I have heard this year. Welcome back to these strong-boned, long-tongued friends.

---

1. ‘Films by Adam Curtis about how humans have been colonised by machines we have built. Although we don't realise it, the way we see everything is through the eyes of the computers.’ BBC.co.uk

2. The Isle of Anglesey, Wales, which saw last stand of the Druids against the Roman occupation of Britain. Both sides were ‘pagans’. Do not be fooled, totalising empires can be built by polytheists, monotheists and atheists alike. They can even be built virtually, to more conveniently include everyone.