NB: solidarity fun.

…

His green spaces are not victims.

They accommodate the charred car,

the rusted BMX, the knackered washer-dryer.

There is a nest, there is a trellis,

there’s a plateau for a basking cat;

there is a snug treasury of red-furred foxes

and cool larders of shade for insect life.

In the yellow cultured honey

of a sagging Anglian dusk,

bees buzz like bar-tenders

in summer’s endless happy hour.

The grass is long and the pollen plentiful.

Tipsy birds regale the rotten apples

with their war stories;

sleeves of sheltering polyvinyl

couch a continuum of sleepy familiars.

The empty paint cans are biological loci-

teeming toad and spawning stickle.

Field mice browse the debris,

owls dither over hunting;

horses crop and dogs hump

and old men puff out their chests in the sun-

as is the privilege of pasture.

And you say that this offends you?

You’d take nature mooning at an unrequited distance.

You’d give the parks and greens the regulation haircuts of raw recruits.

You’d sooner have orderly picnic portions than bees and worms and birds

to eat them.

You’d tear it down,

junk-endowed and briar- besieged,

the rose-besotted palaces

the of six-year old Sleeping Beauties.

You’d tear it down, the Rapunzelling ivy,

the yarning, yearning passion flower-

their hardy hearts exposed to scrutiny.

When you want rare it is isolated

like a laboratory disease, a specimen

for mincing exhibition.

When you want wild

it is stranded at instructive margins

in spaces allotted like hospital beds.

I have an inkling, my fussy dears,

that you like people this way too;

that our mixed blood is a legitimate distress,

a miscegenated eyesore, riotous ethnic bedlam spree.

When you say respect you mean castration.

But his green spaces are not victims. This is our land

we will live as we please.