III
THAT GIRL STANDING THERE
How can I,
that girl standing there
wax political ...? One to stand and stare am I,
to gawp from behind a bush or bin
and let the world go by
if go it will.
But when the world stands too,
and waits for me? Waits
like a lovely wood,
like a track between the trees when there is
sudden silence. The world has waited for me
and I have gone with her
and I have seen of her
a little more
than those who never quit
their native shore
save for a few days' rest
or brief State Visit: and I can tell you all
that the American Dream is very much alive and well
throughout the states of Europe.
Is it the soaps, the films?
The California Girls? The Texas Food?
Las Vegas? Mafia Violence? Is it Sex?
Is it Execution?
They won a war, a war of money, of words,
a media war, a battle of the mike:
but it wasn't communism, oh no,
it was competition that they didn't like.
It seems to me
that the USA has dreams of empire,
that the third millennium is likely to transpire
beneath the stars and stripes.
Refugees go down as they always have, desperately,
into Egypt or some other God-forsaken,
God-haunted
country in the Middle East,
the mother on a donkey still, perhaps,
or on a cart with pots and pans and blankets
fleeing from the lies -
and in her arms, at her breast, amidst the flies,
a bairn, a little mite, poor little
scrap of ethnic garbage. Can
the European dream,
the social dream, survive?
Can that come true?
Or are we all now to believe once more
in blood and money - for blood read race, for money the right
not to have beggars stinking and festering at one's door.
Or dying, disgustingly. Or dead ... That being said -
(an old man rambling: not so old as not to notice, though,
THAT GIRL STANDING THERE) Oh, if I were young again
and had HER in my bed!
