Prevent the people from protesting
with a juicy threat
Silence the Sound-Systems with
un-holstered guns
Bring out the corpse, let the
celebrities come.
Let police choppers circle observing overhead
Pepper spray protesters with the cry
She is dead
Put a quarter mile exclusion zone
round the streets of St Pauls,
Let the coppers wear black DM’s for
that kick in the balls
She was Finchley via Grantham, a
bullet-proof vest
Her twenty hour mantra there is no
time to rest
The long days, dark nights, her
screech and bitter song
I thought her brutal siege would
last forever: I was wrong
The Polling booths are not wanted
now: shut down everyone
Close the mines that survived not
dismantled by The Sun;
Pour away the whiskey and sweep up
the barricades
For nothing good will ever come
until her legacy fades.
After W.H.Auden ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’
2 comments:
I like your re-working of WH Auden's poem... Topic a bit iffey, as in "Don't speak ill of the dead" and all .... But very clever!
Thank you MadAndLovingIt. I appreciate your kind comment and also i recognise the not talking ill of the dead aspect and it wasn't really meant to be a celebration of the passing of a frail old woman.
But I couldn't write something about Margaret Thatcher's death without reflecting the way she polarised society so much and ruined many, many people's lives when she was alive. Also the stunning irony/hypocrisy of getting the state to pay for her funeral given her abhorrence of any kind of state support.
Ultimately though the poem just tumbled from the first line. As soon as that came I just had to go with the flow and try to stick vaguely close to the original!
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