God Rest The Queen

She spoke volumes quietly.
Is everywhere and will remain so
Our shared interest, our common currency
The nation cannot let her go.

Stars untwinkle one by one
The moon, in shock, averts its gaze
No words express the grief we feel
How we loved thee, let us count the ways.

The future, fearful, has gone awol
Life goes on but not the one we know
Though wreaths and words may wither
The nation will not let her go.

Guns fall silent, the flag lowered
She who kept us close is gone
Winter is composing a sad anthem
It will play on and on and on.

8 September 2022 by Roger McGough

for my lover and my good friends

I dreamt of a bakery the other night
and woke with a heart full of such delight.
Noj is the name of the lovely man
who had the skill and had the plan.

I’d met a comrade on the road,
walking on stilts with a tasty load,
it smelled so good, we just had to find
where we could get some more of its kind.

We went off to look for this magical place –
a derelict block. just off the main ways,
it was near to our pub and it seemed alright
to make a diversion and go for a bite.

A maze and a warren, an unfinished plot,
but the ovens were working and the bread was still hot;
he also serves coffee that’s fragrant and strong,
you can drink it short or you can drink it long.

We sat down and crumbled the loaves in our hands
and ate it like that, without butter or jam;
it was wholemeal and filling, but light and delicious;
he asked for a name that was warm and auspicious.

I thought of ‘corn flower’, but cornflowers are blue
and could be confused with maize flour too;
someone else said ‘cornfield’ and that had its charm,
‘the fruit of the corn’ or ‘the fruit of the farm’.

We chatted and laughed and honoured our host
and demanded to know how he’d achieved most
of his vision with so little finances,
what would come next and what were the chances.

The future looked good and I wanted to stay,
I woke up so happy and ready to play,
I know I’ve felt that way before
and that, for sure, I will do some more.

I know I’ve met Noj and will do again –
he’s a cook, a musician, a drinker, a friend,
I know the place and where it is found –
not far from here or another town.

I know he’s long had this beautiful scheme –
it isn’t just me who’s had this dream –
it will all come back when I’m fully awake
then we’ll get together to party and bake.

rs 26.8.04

SO (Social Order) thought they’d dealt with Jon Do when they vaporised him and shut down or disrupted all his networks. They were wrong – his avatar stayed alive on the Net. The programmers and teckies tried everything in and out of the book to neutralise this ghost, but nothing worked. The only way would be to terminate and rebuild the entire system, but that would lead to chaos – the last thing they could face. All they could do was to try and drown him out. Meanwhile …

Jon, or whatever his real name was and few people outside of SO’s inner core knew it, had started small. At first he merely asked questions – innocuous sounding ones like: are you happy? From there he, if it was a ‘he’ and no-one outside of Central Control knew for sure, moved to more challenging matters such as: ‘Give me reasons why you’re not happy’. Slowly his readership grew until the monitors began to take note, but by then it was too late – people were waking up. Word spread and soon others were joining in. The acceptance and passivity that SO had created was being questioned and that could not be tolerated. The hunt was on for the source of this disruption.

It took time. Jon and his ‘Do something’ campaign proved extremely elusive but, in the end, he was caught, allegedly in the Cape Verde Islands, and brought back to face justice. Of course, that all happened in secret – the charges, the trial, the verdict and the sentence – and all reports were silenced … but not before some were noticed. For a while SO relaxed, but then the debates were renewed. Like a bubble of air in a closed plastic bag, as soon as one was squashed, it appeared somewhere else. At first the search concentrated on locating Do’s remaining disciples, but it soon became clear that he hadn’t been completely erased – some version of his mind was still alive and active. How this could happen baffled the experts.

All the usual tricks were tried – from sites, enticing those who agreed, to fake versions of Jon’s ident preaching contradictory messages. Some worked but the infection remained, His icon, the black carnation, could be copied by phoney on-line posters but that just spread the ideas further – they even started appearing on walls in workers’ colonies in many countries.