|

Selling Your Soul

Dulwich Poet

Friday, April 12th, 2013

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 One of the great old grounds
Evoking memories
From before my time
Of cloth caps, Woodbines
And little boys held aloft
To sit and stand pitchside
At the very front
Almost on the touchline itself
Of a football ground.
Some of those very children
Would have forsaken
Their football
To fight the fascists
And spill their blood
The same colour in death
Gushing human claret red
And deathly pale skin white
As if their heroes in their stripes
At the Sunderland Football Club.
Their spirits still howling pain
Bodies turning in anguish
Wherever they’re lain
Be it Spain
With the International Brigade
Or another part of Europe
By the nazis’ slain
In whatever part of your foreign field
Is forever England.
Time to move on
A person’s beliefs are…
Well personal.
It’s the football what matters
Maybe it does…
In your multi-millionaire boardroom world.
But for those fans
Who can trace back each generation
Our debt owed to their forefathers
By our nation
It is not
And cannot be what
A Roman fascist for all to see
Whose personal beliefs go against
Everything that the decent
Men and women who made
Sunderland
The Club they are today
For him to be their figurehead
The day Paulo Di Canio
Stepped onto their training pitch
Was the moment
Your footballing heritage was finally sold
To the stinking rich.
The spirit of Sunderland
AFC RIP

Notes

3rd April 2013: Sunderland Football Club, with a proud working class fan base & heritage, has just appointed Italian fascist sympathiser Paulo Di Canio as their new manager.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/selling-your-soul/