Changed Climate, England, Summer 2019 by Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon

Dust settles on summer windowsills,
on sideboards TVs shimmer Churchill’s ghost
onto modern screens   conjured plasma
realised through BJ’s studied bull-dog slump.

Right-wing masterminds, harness nostalgia,
declare war on liberty, compassion, freedom
with crazy, clownish grins and promised tax cuts.

In extreme heat, blood runs cold. Benighted
whispers escape Mogg’s elocution: the old/young/
frail/different/un-monied/finally everyone
beyond white rank and privilege will fail.
Terror unopposed, trashes lives beyond redemption –

yet in suffocated daylight, foul with fumes,
angry men mop their bows and mutter,
Give the BJ man a chance. Who knows?
Cometh the hour, cometh the man?
Beguiled by his brass-faced badness,
shameless mis-speech, they cling to bleached
colonial dreams, forget collateral nightmares.
Historians are hated, placed under house-arrest
banned from shedding quenching beams of light
into hell, onto our underworld’s smoking coals.

Young people with fresh eyes, call out BJ
and his crew, their coruscated sunshone lies.
Older adults, stupefied, relinquish resistance
to wilful ignorance and time’s scalding, stinking dustbin.