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Race in the time of childhood

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After The Book of Sir Thomas Moreby William Shakespeare

this your noise chid england                                      new strangers
with babies at their backs      plodding to the coast

you sip black ale in a versace suit and watch

no brawl yet              still authority              the streets quiet
where jo cox is lined in chalk                                                 quelling taught

how insolence and strong hand should prevail
that ruffians   their violent fancies wrought             were now
blood fish trespassing to air

feeling shook                    go us to brusselsbonnberlin

and ask which of these realms       by the nature of our error
should give us harbour        we must needs be strangers

in a province somewhat tamed      muzzled naked teeth
still flash (ask those              come out of the sea with no papers)

and having learned our nation’s barbarous temper
they will not afford us an abode on earth                 revert we
lost to the continent

old europe will whet                                         its knavish terror on our throat
step over us                                       likeasifgod
owed not nor made not        us         nor we ourselves

chartered unto vipers                        by our own sick navigation
it becomes a moral case:      to be so used as we would use
once safe       once piece of the main

who treads mountains seeking black humanity
hearing proudly that you have none      the punch-line sweeterinthegut
of those who sweat the story                       long before it’s written?

who reached brixton                                   circa                    one fine day
looked back across salt water                         to see us cutting off our body
in fealty to the poisoned heart?

since the time that we were taken
when will we haunt a body that doesn’t drift and rot?

© Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard

Jay Bernard won the 2017 Ted Hughes Award for new poetry for their multimedia performance work Surge: Side A