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Come On England ~ Revisited

Stuart Butler

Thursday, July 1st, 2021

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 It’s possible to shout that in umpteen different languages
And still mean it.
‘Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman’
And what does that smell like?
It smells of Prehistoric Beaker Folk from Europe,
Of Celts and Romans and their Auxiliaries from Africa and Asia,
Of Picts, and Scots and Angles and Saxons
And Jutes and Vikings and Normans;
Of Flemish weavers
And Protestants fleeing the Counter-Reformation,
And Jews and Africans and Poles and Hungarians
And Germans and Travellers and Czechs and Italians
Ugandans and Irish and Indians
And Sri Lankans and Bangladeshis and Pakistanis
And West Indians and Cypriots and refugees from Chile
And all the others I have missed out because I am writing at speed
Before I miss the ‘bus’
The Omnibus – Latin Word, meaning ‘all’.

Notes

I wrote this poem (along with St George )about twenty years ago and dug them out as museum pieces from an age before social media, UKIP, Brexit, and BLM. it was first published here in Football Poets in Nov 2002. But they’re not museum pieces are they? Every age rewrites history and with social media’s ‘performative platform for the fetishisation of conflict’, perhaps it’s every second now. ~ Stuart Jun 2021 ~

Original Notes (when first published)
I think I read recently that over 250 different languages are spoken in this country at the moment. ~ Stuart 2002~

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Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/come-on-england-revisited/