The Conference of the Flies

 

There is no greater sight
Than spring sun reflected
Upon the all-conquering 
Wings, limbs & gleaming hides
Of the Great Fly Nation!

There is no greater sound
In all the Earth
Than the hum, buzz & flutter
Of our million-fold 
Assembly!

We are fierce
Proud & strong
Ravenous & potent
Ancient,
Indecipherable. 

 

 My new digital publication. The Conference of the Flies are discussing humanity. Do we exist? What are we? What should they do about us?

"The conference at the heart of this piece may be imaginary or fantastic, or it may be channelled and life-changing (not that these things are contradictory).  It is itself an ecology – an eco-telling, an eco-wording, a world-re-storing... We are also invited to contemplate our impact on those whose lives and lifeways are braided with ours."

From the foreword by Graham Harvey, a professor of religious studies at the Open University & author of Animism: Respecting the Living World, Hurst & Co. 2005.

For a short period you can download this text as a free ebook in pdf format here.

Delving into Mystic Warwickshire With John Watson

My friend John Watson is the host of Pure Good and Right Poetry in Kenilworth with his wife Kim. He has written a book of autobiographgical sketches, poetry & riddles entitled Delves into Mystic Warwickshire. The book contains clues to find seven tokens hidden around the county, after which, if you produce some art or writing that meets his approval, you win a bronze delve, which is like a cross between a trowel & a gardening knife.

At the time of writing five of them have now been found.

The artwork is by Andrea Mbarushimana.

I spent some days on the quest & then one Sunday afternoon Anne & I found the token for the delve named Columba on Castle Hill, Lower Brailes.

Here is my poem celebrating it all, entitled:  

Mystic Delving Beyond Sight & Sound
(Not a single hero’s deed was to be found)

Delving into the self-secret that is the ground the springtime labyrinth of the good green land 

Tree lined lanes all garlanded for birth the busy birds all sing their voices delight of light

A flowering of magical, virid sound which celebrates the living soil that is the shining song

The living soil that is the shining song secretes the sparkling fungal spiral’s girth

That leads us on the round of Brailes’ baileys our errant way that yet might prove our worth

To delve, to seek the icon yet unfound in the tree where the wren makes her tiny cup of nest

Where the wren makes her tiny cup of nest guarded by hedgerow power between & beyond 

Beyond the names of fields & the numbers on the gates from one portal to the next

Stations in the rhythm of the search, the track, the path, the copse that broods upon Castle Hill

In the copse that broods upon Castle Hill some of the hawthorns are twisted all around

In gargoyle gestures from millennia with gorsey joys all wound round the shining centre

Luminous paths  to lead us in May’s merry dance the golden spangle of celandines at our feet 

With the golden spangle of celandines at our feet we seek the secret way that might be found

Within old rings of memory, history, remembrance, repetition tumbling all around

Forgotten names & words as hidden as the tiny grey eggs in Mother Wren’s secret installation

Like Mother Wren’s secret installation we seek the secret hiding place unseen

Beyond the houses & roads of today’s wounded world up, back, round the ways of deep time

Here again & again & again. A sound! My voice wife crying out from within the tree

My voice wife crying out from within thorn gloom with delight & pride, what sound!

The talisman brought forth into our day from the self-secret shadows of the tree!

The tallest tree at top of hill yields the token that we sought: the mysterious icon finally found!

Ekphrasis von Kunstformen der Natur

Nature's manifestations are infinite and endlessly fascinating.
Nature is the ultimate source of inspiration and beauty.
Man's place in nature is not outside of it, but as an integral part of the natural world.
The study of nature is not limited to the realm of facts and figures, but also encompasses the realm of aesthetics and emotions. 
Ernst Haekel 

Radiowhales

Tassled tesselated suns of ridges & spines fall through the light
the unseen made seen in an oceanic flight through the seas of time,
a morphology rhythmed & rhymed in its complexity, spiralling
downward to meet itself, slowly rotating in its inevitable descent.
Only gravity's lament could rise to join the disintegrating frills,
globes, wings or stars of the sinking stellium. Hills are an accumulation of sunshine speckles,
once they were arms, armatures fickle breast plates that failed the test,
spines, spires & curlicues come to rest in death's dark garden,
all night shadow, yet we see white, hardened stone, green downland:
whalebacks built from tiny bones no bigger than sand grains.

Day Atoms

The brown bloom upon the rock is a geometry of mandalas & crescents, tubes & triangles
that jerk or slide smoothly within the tangled fibres of the colony,
shine green or gold, ochre yellow or red but only when seen clearly.
They look like dirt but they are lively & lovely in their own way,
on a slow migration across the surface of the day, hungry for photons,
the most ancient ones, the oxy-concatenators, light loving synthesisers,
delicacies hidden in their hat-box, jewellery box, earring bright wafers,
on rhythmic daily journeys, secret flavours, sucked into the hairy, funnel mouths
of rotifers & stentors, heading south among the digestive membranes 
or caught upon the spiny vanes of the larger filter feeders who rule the puddle.

      

 

 

 

 

 

Sucking it Up

In their flowery hats they twist & turn in the pool,
all tendril & tubule, like a Howard Phillips nightmare,
all their organs laid bare, wetly shining on the outside
with their wide wild, star-shaped mouths flinging blind tentacles
into the invisible current, spectacular breasts & phalli
in thicket bunches & boquets, mucus gleaming 
naked for all to see like that statue of Artemis from Ephesus,
hungry for whatever the primal waters will deliver
struggling to escape the inevitable river of death
delivered into the ciliated, fringed & filligreed maw of the immobile beast.

Ferny Animal Rosebud 

The swaying crinoid colours of the Palaezoic Garden
are not yet lost to us, not all yet hardened into fossil etchings, bas-reliefs
or tangled sculptures of once life; vertebral stems still survive;
the leggy, ferny rosebud heads still rear, alive, waving
their feathered arms & gnarly little legs like ravers at a wild sea bed party
off the coelocanth haunted coasts of Indonesia
where their beautiful but hardy Cambrian Crowns
down, deep in the tropical waters,
remind us of so much that we have lost
now known only from books or museum dioramas.

A Moment of Tiny Time

They look as if they are hurrying to a party
shedding scales as they uncharacteristically flee the light
for the shadow; are their plumes & fringes camouflage or display?
Rendered in  monotone like an old newspaper photograph 
of society's finest, snapped by some punk reporter 
on their way to a gala of The Gilded Age
spurs, spines & antennae all presented flawlessly,
as they launch themselves into the ball,
the nineteen twenties flappers of the insect world 
dancing at the end of their time.

 

 

Leggy Maze Bright

You could open some camphorated drawer to see them
shrivelling on their pins, casting shadows upon the board
with little tags to tell you who they are, the names of their families,
or in well sealed jars of ghastly, filmy fluid
like comically scary ghosts in children's drawings
their legs curled in that monstrous grasping at nothing
death posture: the spiders, mites, ticks & vinegaroons
the solifugids & the scorpions
rendered beautiful this once, not creepy for the phobes:
they are not predators, but victims of the human mind.

 

 

 

 

A Flower?

They don’t have teeth, but they look hungry
or angry, like a crowd of them are ganging up on you 
coming in for the kill, or some kind of consummation
are they here to bite you or to kiss you? The orchids
assemble like animals; hissing, howling & smacking their lips,
the vivid dyes of their tepals & stigmas seem too lurid to be alive
waving, flapping or trailing like scarves & streamers
as writhing, they advance towards you,
flapping, trumpeting & gesturing their inevitable victory
straight out of a hellscape in a Fleischer cartoon.

 

 

 

 

==

Ekphrastic poems inspired by the art work of  Ernst Haeckel, 1834-1919. 

Haeckel’s art work includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms of Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. He wasn’t a very right on chap politically but I just love this book. Incidentally, Haenkel’s Law of Recapitulation, which says that ontology recapitulates phylogeny, IE that embryos go through stages of development which correspond to the stages in our evolution, was debunked long, long ago. (Just for the record.)

I sometimes wonder if that gentleman of Providence, Mr. Howard Phillips Lovecraft, once perused these pages & shuddered. Ye who know, know; ye who do not won’t want to. 

 

 

For those of you to whom these organisms are riddles: radiolaria/ coccoliths, diatoms/ desmids, siphonophores, crinoids, moths, arachnids & orchids.

We Remember You: Wroth Silver 2025

We Remember You 

Oh you spirits of the hedgerow,
Great & small, mostly unseen,
Sharp clawed, curled presences
Of feather & fur, scale & scape
Dark little eyes awoken before dawn today;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you waves of winter birds
Come from the north, the east:
Redwing, fieldfare, woodcock, lapwing;
Dark duck, goose skein, starling,
Here you are again upon our fields, our hills & our pools;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you forgotten ones,
Around your fires, feasting,
Watching the great winter come & go
Through millennia of the hunt,
Following the song lines of your & our ancestors;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you drover-men of oxen
Faring far along the ridge-land
Road from before there were roads
Eyes searching the horizon, the woods edge,
For wolves, some of them human;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you armies on the march
Come to conquer,
Kill or enslave the land-people,
With your leather boots & helmets,
With your shields & spears;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you herders, tenant-farmers & parishioners
Going out of your way
To attend the gathering, to pay your dues
Some rising in the dark,
Some spending nights away from home;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you stout men
With your boots & your pipes, 
Your breeches & hats, with your dogs at your feet,
Taking your breakfast,
Exchanging news, doing business at the table;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

Oh you twentieth century people
Who came on your bikes & in your buses & cars
In your overcoats & wellies
To stand upon the hill
& celebrate your heritage;
We remember you, we know you,
We think of you!

We are the fortunate ones
Free to choose how & where & when we assemble here
To come, go & speak as we please
Our freedoms hard won for us 
By those who fought for them before us;
We remember you all, we know you all,
We think of you all, we thank you all!

Wroth Silver!

This is my twelfth offering as the Wroth Silver Bard! It is a great honour & a pleasure. To read my previous Wroth Silver poems & find out more about this unique & ancient event follow these links:

http://www.wrothsilver.org.uk/
2014: Martinmas
2015: The Road of Time
2016: Wheel of the Year, Wheel of the Land
2017: Eight Decades
2018: Ghosts
2019: Throw a Penny in the Hollow of the Stone 
2020-21 Dear Ancestors
2022: The End of an Era
2023: In the Picture, Making History 
2024: The Knight Within the Low

The Unseen Made Seen

 

My new pamphlet of poetry is out now! Thirty poems spanning ten years with a sort of theme.

Trees, whales, blood & black holes; sulphur, uranium & carbon; lost friends & beloved music.

Find out more & buy it here.

 "I was repeatedly gripped and surprised by its poems. Daring at an almost Swinburnian floridity, these are always ‘hymns’ and never songs, chanted under a sky that is ever 'darkening' if it is there at all. The poems pulse and seethe with a rare voluptuousness. The literary equivalents of swirling synths, both alchemy and early Tangerine Dream serve as objective correlatives for their metaphors; these poems clamour at meaning, are swept away by the surge of their own diction only to be swept back in on an urge to connect... For these poems are suffused with the kind of generous vision that sees a dancer rather than a corpse, spurns the inhibitions of the fear-cravers, and takes time to sit with a “horned godling”. What others see as obstacles, these poems open as doorways."

From the introduction by Phil Smith, author of Albion's Eco-Eerie, Temporal Boundary Press.

"A song amongst the noise. A poet whose words you feel as well as read. When I read Patterson's poetry and prose it makes me realise why I fell in love with poetry as he makes the world-scapes dance and shine brighter by the way he writes."

Anthony Owen, author of Post Atomic Glossaries: New & selected poems, Broken Sleep Books.

"I love Barry Patterson's poetry! It is full of guts and energy: wonderfully vivid and powerful imagery, coupled with depth and a profound connection to life. I just can't put this collection down!" 

Philip Carr-Gomm, author of Druid Mysteries, Rider.

2007: The Final Cave

For the people of Tingri, whom I met long ago. The recent earthquake  raises many thoughts about them, prayers for them, & the power places that they guard.

 

 

The Final Cave

 

Ten of us in the truck & some holding onto the outside bash our way across the desert that is Tibet.

We've learned the secret language of rocks, sand & all the shades of what is usually called brown.

Stained another earthy shade by tradition's regolith, we smell of burned juniper & butter fat.

We sing through the violence of our passage, heads throbbing in time with the molecules of the tune.

Most of us can't see outside the truck too well as it bounces down dry river bed miles of stones.

  

 

First village: find someone who knows the man who knows where we can find the final cave;

Second village: find someone who knows the man with a key to unlock the door to the final cave;

Third village: find the man with the key & persuade him to come with us without getting lost.

We see through our pain, sing mantras built out of oxygen atoms, noiseless in the brain's light.

The truck bumps & lurches its way across the salt spiked, sun flashed plain of the Sakyas. 

Out there in the badlands somewhere there is a ruined gompa with a huge willow tree growing by it.

There must be land marks, but all we can see out of the back of the truck most of the time is sky.

Sometimes snow-capped Himalaya guarding the high plateau's edge & calling us back to our other life. 

 

Sing on through the final headache, the price of this journey is pain, brain-bones rattled roadless.

Mind filled by aspiration prayers whose words unknit the storylines of inner & outer worlds.

It's really high & the final walk up a gentle path makes geriatrics of us all, past  piles of mani stones.

Ahead, ruined walls splashed with vivid ochre paint on white lime & a tree festooned with scarves;

 

 

Scarves dangle from the cave's holy, holed roof, the old men light butter lamps & we all sit together.

Machigma & Padampa were here, a thousand years ago, we've read the story many times.

 

 

 

Dave leads the practice.

We sing.

Time stops.

Words stop.

Pain is gone.

We're silent & still together.

Om.

 

 

 

 

 

Wroth Silver 2024: The Knight Within the Low

They say
There is a knight
Within the low

A prince
Or warrior
From the old times

Burned bones perhaps
In an urn
Long gone down into the earth

Of dreaming sleep
The roots’ bed
A shroud made of soil.  

Maybe he is crouched
In a cist
Of local red stone

With his knees
Drawn up
To his chest

& his favourite
Flagon
Or a sword by his side

Maybe he wears gold
Around his arms
Or on his chest

We will
Never know
& cannot see.

Perhaps he senses us
As we all
Come & go

Back & forth
In the circles
Of our lives

In the sun-rain wheel
Of our years
& seasons

Footsteps on the path
Journeys
On the roaring road.

& when we gather
Can he hear us
Calling out?

Calling out the names
Of villages
He doesn’t recognise?

Paying
Wroth Silver to the
Land’s lord?

Meeting & greeting
Our friends & neighbours
On the wintry morning?

What would
He think of us
If he could see?

In our shiny
Winter gear
Hoods & boots?

Or hear us speak
Would he understand
A single word?

But I think that he would
Understand
Why we keep returning to this place.

Maybe he was born
& bred here
Or his people came from far away

Driven by strife
Through the stormy seas
That surround the island

Whatever his origin
Or life
Now he is our ancestor

By virtue of us
Gathering
At his grave

& whatever his or our origins may be
We the celebrants
Are no longer strangers to him

For we
Just as did he
Recognise the power

Of community.

 

 

My eleventh offering as the Wroth Silver Bard! It is a great honour & a pleasure. To read my previous Wroth Silver poems & find out more about this unique & ancient event follow these links:

http://www.wrothsilver.org.uk/
2014: Martinmas
2015: The Road of Time
2016: Wheel of the Year, Wheel of the Land
2017: Eight Decades
2018: Ghosts
2019: Throw a Penny in the Hollow of the Stone 
2020-21 Dear Ancestors
2022: The End of an Era
2023: In the Picture, Making History

The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci Rides Again!

The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci rides again!

In a down-to-earth and practical way it suggests ways for people to explore, find and make deeper contact with their own special places. There is also a very personal journey through the inner landscape of the mind and the book deals with various methods of dealing with the issues that outdoor meditation and magic are likely to bring up, including privacy, safety and protection for both the place and the person.

 

It's a pdf of 157 pages, updated & abridged. 

 

I originally said I'd make it available for a donation but I found a free way of making it downloadable for a small fee. It costs £6.99. (UKP)

If you can't afford that & are desperate to read it just get in touch. I hope that it behaves in your various readers. Please let me know, one way or another.

Entire chapters have been excised & some re-named. I have also updated some sections. This isn’t an academic text, so references are limited to a short Further Reading section at the end of each chapter. I’ve been advised to have a practical section at the end of each chapter, but to do that I’d have to re write everything. Besides, this is a very practical book! You’ll find practical suggestions on just about every page. However, to make it easy for you to find specific practices or advice I have made an Index of Practicalities, which you will find at the end of the book.

You can get it from here: https://payhip.com/TAoCwtGL and you can read about it's origins by clicking on the dedicated tab at the top of this page.

Buy Now

 

Exquisite Without Having to be a Corpse

 Dionysian without being reckless
Exquisite without having to be a corpse
Wild without being terrifying
Enormous without being oppressive
Luminous without being obvious
Wise without being patronising
Loving without being nostalgic
Angry without being violent
Beautiful without being pretty
Perfect without being self conscious

Moon Rings

 

We can sense
something
both intimate & cosmic
in the galilean moons
in their silver rings of orbit.

Cosmic
because we know
how far away
they are
& how ancient.

Intimate
because those
delicate points of light
now shine within
our own body.

A direct
connection between
the infinite
& the small:
the night’s lights
& the body’s darkness
are both
secretly transparent
to one another.

Our task
is to
recognise this.

Our task
is to
recognise our chains
of space & time
but not to
serve them
or struggle against
them
but to see them
clearly.

Like the orbits
of distant
tiny moons.

Wroth Silver 2023: In the Picture, Making History

There they are, over a hundred years ago
In their flat caps, bowler hats, bonnets & a stovepipe
Standing round the stone in unusual daylight
Making history.

Schoolboys in striped caps, a lady with a feather stole
A constable, a father, a grandad & a farmer
Came to pay Wroth Silver on Martinmas Eve
Came to make history.

Men outside The Dun Cow, in their big boots & waistcoats
In alpha male stances with their glasses in their hands
& their long stemmed pipes & their serious expressions
Making history.

Look, a crowd gathered under the lone pine tree
Before there was a hedge & a lorry load road
Some came on their bicycles all the way from Coventry
To make history.

& back in the pub, all sat round for breakfast
With a collie dog wagging its tail under the table
The ubiquitous church wardens make an interesting composition
Make it history.

Now this lot here, are wearing their Sunday best
At Knightlow Cross, in early November?
Another really posed one, taken in broad daylight
But still they’re making history.

At last we have a photo that was taken before dawn
That woman in the headscarf must be very tall
& that smart looking young man in a dark overcoat
He’s definitely making history!

& there’s Bill Quarterman & Mr. Camping with the charter
A schoolboy & a lady in a bright chequed coat
In the background, my predecessor Victor the Poet
He certainly made history.

Here’s Mr. Sparrow in his waxed estate jacket
Who raised a twinkle in the eye of the Queen
The mayor in his scarlet robe, Doc with a video camera on a stick & William Waddilove
Making history.

There’s David on the eightieth anniversary of his attendance
& Gill & Anne counting the money afterwards
When we had moved to the Queen’s Head in Bretford for our breakfast
Now even that is history.

& here’s a dark blurry one walking down the road
Of early morning twilight & headlight smears
The first time that I came here, not so long ago
We were all colts once
Whatever hats
Whatever boots
Or means of transport we prefer
Whatever may be going on in the wide world
We’re still in the picture
Making history.

 

My tenth year of serving as the Wroth Silver Bard! It is a great honour & a pleasure. To read my previous Wroth Silver poems & find out more about this unique & ancient event follow these links:
http://www.wrothsilver.org.uk/
2014: Martinmas
2015: The Road of Time
2016: Wheel of the Year, Wheel of the Land
2017: Eight Decades
2018: Ghosts
2019: Throw a Penny in the Hollow of the Stone 
2020-21 Dear Ancestors
2022: The End of an Era

If you visit my other poems you will see many of the old photos which I mentioned in my poem this year. The title of last year's poem was made poignant by the choice to stand down of David Eadon as the main organiser of the event, a role which he took up in 1967. He attended Wroth Silver a total of 85 times. Here he is as a young man in a dark overcoat, second from the left, in 1951, as mentioned in the seventh stanza of my poem.

 

The Winds of Fethaland

Fethaland is far from here:

We took the long road
From the sea-free net savvy middle-lands
The the furthest point
Of what there they call the Main Land.

Spelling each other on the weird ways
Of the modern road system
To a welcome from friend-strangers:
A homely house in grey-green Glasgow.

& on, on to The Flower of Scotland
The granite grey ford-town
Where big boats with cranes
Waited in the harbour for their summons to the sea-fields.

Fields to be ploughed on our behalf
By M.V Hjaltland to Shetland
Through the guillemot’s kitchen
Our fellow travelers, fulmars.

While beneath us, unseen
We passed the black muds that will
Some day be shining stones
On a distant, future shore.

Through the undark night
We passed peaceful Fair Isle
Saw, in a sleepy simmer-dim
Dark cliffs, a lit house, through window glass.

Morning & into the muddy bay of the Sword Hilt Isle
A land of fiddle players & sheep
Otter-people, skua-people, red throated diver-people,
More Norse than Scot, Sea-People.

Up shag haunted voe & merlin haunted moor
A winding road, a long road
The last road, to the final station, with
Winter’s peewits & dunlin already arriving.

This is not a path followed
By many footfalls in these fast days
But we delight in rocky shores
& their inhabitants, past & present.

Those lonely hills of sedge-heather
Were once pleasant pasture
& the small round stone houses
Of the ancient people may still be seen.

They lived well here in their time
With good grain, kale & kine
But even older secrets & wonders
Pass beneath our feet.

From the polished Dalriadan moine
We hike over onto the glooming basement
The dark, blocky castles & spires
Of mythical, primal, pre-cambrianity.

The view from Raven’s window:
Black framed, mad-jagged
By beserker storm waves of The Western Sea
A view of emptiness all the way to the North Pole.

That’s not a place where Raven wants to go
For that is the land of death
& he loves life & in their own way
He & his wife celebrate its richness.

So we reached the last bastion of our journey
From Mercia to the High Lands, Isle Lands
& beyond, believing that we can’t get much further
From the ugliness, waste & hubris left behind us.

But even here, the piratic bonxie, the curlew
The kittiwake & the common-as-muck
Not so common, common gull
Could soon be gone from these plastic speckled shores.

& even here that the ever-so smart signals
Of the self-conscious otherworld
Still illuminate the screen tells all
Or would, because I switched it off.

No GPS map, no texts or trendy kennings
From the country of the meme-people,
We are alone with the power of this place
& it is more real than they are.

& we are neither lost nor last, nor can we ever be
Like the tern or the turnstone
We can find our way in this world
& it has lead us here, to the fat winds of Fethaland.

 

Note:
I have used kennings based on the origin of place names throughout the poem. eg. Shetland= Hjaltland=Sword Hilt Land; Glasgow=grey-green; Fethaland=Fat-Land.

Night Jar

 

 

Nightjar! Oh night jar!
We drank from the shadowy bottle of your light
Glass chink the last alarm call
Of some small bird by the path,
As Nightjar, oh night jar,
Your mothy cloak of
Of wing-clap wander-gloom
Spread over the deeping wood.
Three old friends & a younger person;
From the Queen, whom
They call The Major these days;
Past Medusa’s broken crown
& the Central Oak,
Taking care not to step on glow-worms;
Nightjar, oh night jar,
From out the forest we came!
Out onto the owl & pipit
Haunted common, to hear your
Croaking riffym rhythms!
Gloaming made visible;
Primal, primary, pre-human,
Praeternatural, preyventionally obscure,
A whirling, whirring, whiling for a whist
Among the birches, pines, gorse & heather.
Oh yes,
& the cuckoos were up late too.

A great evening in Sherwood Forest & on Budby Heath with friends, human & other than human. Riffym is a word coined by my friend Leanne Bridgwater which means an improvised rhythm. See her posthumous book, adDictionary, for more of the same. Preyventionally is a word I made up; I think it makes sense. Gratitude to my companions.

Wroth Silver 2022: The End of an Era

 

The End of An Era

Was that the last swallow of summer?
First frost on the car this morning?
Crisp peppery leaves line the track to the wood,
The robin wakes up to song again,
Young starlings gather & chatter,
The nights draw in.

The year is like a wave
That builds & crests & breaks & falls;
We all feel it & this is history
Her story, our story, the end of an era:
The Elizabethan Age
Of never having had it so good.

You don’t need me to tell you
That the white heat of the sonic boom
Of modernism
Will always come up against this:
Time versus the timelessness of the cycle,
Whilst the words we use each day
Would baffle a person from the fifties.

Even more so the people of the land
In whose footsteps we walked today;
Who saw war, famine & disease
Come & go, just as we have. & here we are
Stood around our stone before dawn
Where, year on year
The wave of history itself breaks for us.

So we, whatever the world may say or do,
Whatever change may come
Are gathered in our meeting place once again:
To pay the Duke his due
& toast the Monarch’s health
Year upon year, age upon age.

The land bears witness to their & our travails
For Sovereignty will always take on form.
Mother, father, son & heir:
May he & all his people
Be blessed, protected & guided by the ancestral wisdom
Which draws us back to Knightlow.
God save the King!

This was my ninth year as the poet laureate of Wroth Silver with the performance of my work at the Wroth Silver Breakfast, held for some years now at the Queen's Head in Bretford. My thanks & respect, as ever go to the guardians of this ancient local tradition, William Waddilove & David Eadon; the latter having attended the ceremony for the 85th time this year.

The title of my poem, The End of an Era, is now doubly poignant as since we saw him last week, David Eadon who has organised things since the 1960s has announced that he will no longer be attending for  health reasons. Thank you David, for all your years of dedication!

When I  refer to sovereignty I mean that which is most noble & most able to serve within us all, not merely a state of aristocratic privilege.

To read my previous Wroth Silver poems & find out more about this unique & ancient event follow these links:
http://www.wrothsilver.org.uk/
2014: Martinmas
2015: The Road of Time
2016: Wheel of the Year, Wheel of the Land
2017: Eight Decades
2018: Ghosts
2019: Throw a Penny in the Hollow of the Stone 
2020-21 Dear Ancestors

The Wroth Silver Breakfast in the 1920s