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Splendid Isolation

Stuart Butler

Tuesday, September 25th, 2001

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 With this new First World feeling of vulnerability,
Fashionable irony goes out the window
Just as the gas masks are passed in,
(“It’ll be my third world war”, says my mum)
Concerns about asteroids, Kyoto, cars and global warming,
For the moment, seem part of a safer, saner world,
When we had the time to look for worries and stretch them out,
Like in that golden summer before September 11,
That time when like an end of season league table,
Everyone knew their place.
But not now…Ah, War!
Purifier of the Blood and Soul!
You can make petty domestic constraints like spending limits
Magically disappear,
And You can make market forces no longer forces,
You are the master of everything.
But in this calm before the storm,
When the constant muffled steady drone of B52’s
Carries on unseen, far overhead above my roof-top,
I take time to write this,
Gazing at the vine outside my window,
The vine grown from a cutting from my parents’ house,
The vine that grew on top of my grand-dad’s Anderson bomb shelter,
The vine that turned warfare into wine;
And I sit here in the sleepless early hours,
Thinking of the plane we saw last week,
Its flashing lights cutting across the midnight constellations,
Turning the Plough’s silver shares into swords,
And when you get these little anxieties,
When you feel vulnerable and worry about your loved ones,
When you see the parallels with the summer of 1914,
And the summers that went before,
Then you can’t help but feel that the threatened football strike,
No matter what the rights and wrongs,
Seems just a little, you know, insular.

Notes

Had a bad worried night. Lost again.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/splendid-isolation/