From The Argotist Online

FLOUNDERING BY THE PREACHING OF THE WORD
(Radio Edit)

I. The Bird That Never Flew

Nothing as sophisticated as a copper clip,
nothing that could be reversed, poor bird:
it was plucked at birth.

Wee bald hatchling, what chance?
What chance did it ever have?
Even the fattest, most languid cat
could’ve trapped it under cruel claw.

What chance? Its caged-bird song
plaintive as foghorns
strained from the Clyde’s forgotten dawn,
melancholy with dull dreams
of washing days and tenement greens.

Oh dearie me. Oh me, oh my!
Puir wee chookie bird couldnae fly.

II. The Bell That Never Rang

Cracked and choked with city soot
this bell is mute,
witless in senile silence:
a belly full of bitter bile.

What use a voice as clear as cymbals
if the heart’s too dark to love?
What use calling up the faithless
to hear the preaching of the word?

III. The Tree That Never Grew

This is no dear green place
but a wasteland
of broken concrete blocks,
with barbed wire strands
blowing like streamers
in the wind.

And this tree is no tree
but a petrified, withered stump,
without branches, without leaves,
its bark, frost-bled,
scored with a cross-hatch
of angry slogans.

The pope
and also, inevitably,
the queen,
and so the acronyms
of these warring tribes
grow, like fungus.

No wonder
this tree never grew.
How could anything flourish
under such leaden skies?

IV. The Fish That Never Swam

Bloody river,
bloody river of this city’s undoing
with your bloody history
of shipbuilding and conquest,
of slavery and theft,
all dressed up
in the tarnished gilt
of imperial majesty:

your dereliction is a plague
visited by the gods
upon all your daughters and sons.

Syphilitic river, no wonder
no fish ever swam
in your poisonous waters.

© Dee Rimbaud 2005