And then? The rats will still be underground
Snug in their galleries, unsought, unfound
Untried and tied to undermining tricks
Until your houses shiver and collapse like sticks:
They speak corruption, live among its flowers
Proliferate black seeds in April showers.
The heart stops breeding fields of verity
Becomes an eggtimer overworked and spun
By propaganda whose ignoble run
Of words begets not progress but obesity.
One day you’ll take your best friend’s hand
And feel his fingers turning into sand.
No one will lift the black patch from a warning
Who cannot see the night from too much morning.
So? You ask too many questions, son:
Take off those glasses, and pick up that gun.
2
Those continentals, the funny English say,
Until my brain rebels and with grey
Just logic substitutes for ‘English’ a word
Many might object to, a label too absurd
To comprehend, a double syllable
That to me will remain unkillable
Like gutter children or an Arab nomad:
Namely I rename an Angle ‘OGAD’.
This brain-somersault has made
It suddenly impossible to call
An oak a limetree or a spade a spade
After sixty months meandering
In warm Majorca and coniferous glade
Where many tongues in silent valleys mix
To push my English to the further banks of Styx.
The first grey sago-OGAD met by me
Was on the high grey waves of OGAD sea,
Stamping passports on the ferryboat
Before the mouth of Dover’s dismal throat.
Unprivileged aliens in their special queue
Etched their names for white-faced men in blue,
Unbribable stern servants of the realm
Whose rat-like ashen fingers grip the helm
Of OGADLAND, keep an inner circle speed
To guard an obsolescent greed
Of law and order firm behind seven veils
Of self-important mists — and Channel gales.
I lingered in this continental line
Idealizing Britain-of-the Brine
To my American wife with passport green,
Until a tall Sicilian wept and cried
That those grey OGAD cliffs so vaguely seen
Would ever bar his way to Paradise –
Because a leaden-weighted face of ice,
Bilious from its last attack of spleen,
Based his entry on a throw of dice.
Weeping so, he’d do no wrong
I say, but who am I when rubber stamps
And lines of ANGLE-OGAD faces vet
With blank dictatorship these so-called tramps?
Such rats will face the floodtide yet.
3
Many pink-faced OGADS of the north
I have met on Sundays leading forth
Pink-faced OGAD-dogs on lengths of leather
On typical wet days of OGAD weather.
The second month came musically sweet
And mild, blue skies glittering with birdsong
And silver jetplanes frolicking like fleet
Lambs not yet responsible. ‘What a
Beautiful raincloud over there!’
Black and grey, yet
Surely a silver-lining lurks somewhere?
How strangely like a mountain, round and jet;
Moving with speed, yet silently, no rain
Falling from its cabbage — no, cauliflower — head:
And suddenly a mushroom grows instead!
Such OGAD weather does not give clear vision
Hides all above the level of the eyes
Makes only power to see with fair precision
Certain orders posted by the wise
Of this dark OGAD world: ‘Keep off the grass’
And ‘Queue this side of sign’. ‘Thou shalt not pass
Unless your child or dog be on a lead’.
‘Keep to the left’. ‘Slow down’. ‘Reduce your speed’.
‘Don’t park your car upon this hallowed spot’.
‘Drop litter here’. (That animals begot?)
‘Step along there, room for two inside’.
And not one democrat looked up and sighed:
You need not lift your face towards the sky,
All orders are placed level with the eye.
These pithy messages must make good trade
For those who paint them. A poet’s blade
Can’t cut more ice, the brains
Of dull bespectacled sad OGAD folk
Are taught by television and a race for trains
Each morning not to test the laden yoke
By a gaze to heaven, when all earthy bread
Is planted firmly at their feet instead.
4
Revolution is the word of God
A firefly that lifts from soddened ground
For one second at the end of spring.
So go the workings of the unsound
Mind in its beginnings, a minor sting
That no rat notices, and turns no brown
Last winter’s leaf to face the sky.
In this live jungle must the mind leap down
To feed on pickings of dark soil, and shy
Its hawk-beak at the earth’s sweet guile:
Then rise full-caloried to kill in style.
These are the commandments of the rats:
You shall be born into the melting-vats
Without an eye to give or a tooth to lose
And never want for schooling, work or shoes.
Good: but each advertisement is a decree
A hanged man on the propaganda tree
(From ITV as well as BBC)
To make it shoot up high and thin:
A hundred thousand may begin
To march one damp October dawn:
You can’t thank Life that you were born,
Says Rat beneath his atom-cloud: the melting-vats
Demand obedience to no one but the rats.
You shall love the rats who take the hours
From your clumsy hands, who guide you over roads
And traffic islands, take heavy loads
From lighter brains, give paper flowers
Of happiness, and stand you in a line
For bus or train, transport you to a house
And television set and OGAD wine:
You too can be a rat divine
A living civil servant of a louse
Though first you must become a mouse.
O hear me, soulless OGADS of the mist
Older than the rocks on which you pissed
The winter snows away for idle summer;
Listen to the rawboned pitprop drummer
Who versifies rebellion from the ice
(In exile where he feeds on uncooked rice
That one day will explode his walnut fist)
Hear his warning over your contented mummer
And the mewings of devoted mice:
Catastrophe will be the last device.
5
So keep your whiskers weaving while you may
Beneath blue helmets, antennae of the law
Sensitively finding those who pray
For criminal success by some shop door.
The time to strike is now. Drop your club
Upon the head that holds ideas to boast
Your kill, who stands like an untamed cub
For buses on the wrong side of the post.