Is That Really How To Do It?
A seat and shelter commemorating the Tolpuddle Martyrs was erected in 1934
by the wealthy London draper Sir Ernest Debenham.
Transporting half a dozen Dorset men on trumped-up evidence:
the gentry’s way of thwarting calls to raise farm workers’ pay.
A rich man later builds the six a thatched memorial.
On Derby Day, a reckless suffragette brings down the King’s own horseman
greatly scandalising Middle England’s media
which these days lets us glimpse that newsreel like a holy relic.
In the end, descendants, counterparts
and clones of those who used to loathe protesters
learn to criticise (or fail to praise)
such forbears as the merchants and MPs
who mocked Sam Plimsoll’s loading safety rules
or treated shackled limbs and souls as freight.
A British minister inspects a cell to which her uncle sent
the rebel colonist who brought his people independence.
She gives a hush-voiced interview as if it were a shrine.
If any governments exist two hundred years from now in countries
still unflooded and unfried they’ll probably profess
a deep respect for eco-mobs who bravely blocked our roads.
Activists who make the landlord fix
the flaws in his estate he’s tried to hide
have done his heirs a favour – even all those
Mr Punch-style diehards who believe
the way to do it is to batter down
all upstarts who disturb the status quo.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is current poetry editor of the on-line magazine London Grip and, with Nancy Mattson, runs a poetry reading series in Islington which is now known as Poetry Above the Crypt.
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the tombs of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we wouldn’t have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’ Therefore you testify to yourselves that you are children of those who killed the prophets. Matthew 23:29-31