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Doctor Foster

Stuart Butler

Thursday, November 7th, 2002

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Doctor Foster went to Gloucester
All in a shower of rain,
He stepped in a puddle
Right up to his middle
And never went there again;
So he wouldn’t know about
All the ways in which we shout
“Come on England!”
So, listen and give a big hand
To Albanian, Arabic and Cantonese,
Bangla, Creole and Vietnamese,
Croatian, Czech, French, Congolese,
Icelandic, Italian and Portuguese,
German, Kazakh/Russian and Japanese,
(Oh dear! I just heard Dr. Foster sneeze)
Korean, Kurdish, Dari and Farsi,
Polish, Pushtu, Serbo-Croat, Hindi,
Spanish, Russian, Slovak, Swahili,
Shona, Thai, Turkish and then Twi,
Serbian, Urdu, Hindi, Gujarati,
Latvian, Ukrainian, Kinarwanda, Kirundi,
Mandarin, Norwegian, Panjabi, Romanian,
And right at the end, we’ve outer Mongolian.
So if Doctor Foster went back to Gloucester,
In sunlight or in rain,
He’d find diversity and also plurality,
A tradition he’d want maintained.

© Stuart Butler

Notes

Some of the languages spoken here in Gloucester. The UK has only just over 1% of the world’s refugees. Tanzania has 6% and Germany nearly 8% :- Gloucestershire Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers GARAS.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/doctor-foster/