[First section of a new sequence of poems titled America]

“Lavatory valued at £1m taken from Winston Churchill’s birthplace just before 5am on Saturday” – Guardian newspaper headline

“You are America… America is not the project of any one person. The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ ‘We The People.’ ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ‘Yes We Can.’ That word is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone. Oh, what a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.” – Barack Obama – Extract from 2015 speech, sculpted into the façade of the Obama Presidential Museum.

“[The future James II]  had been attracted to Arabella Churchill, one of the maids of honor who waited on his first wife. The young lady was plain: but the taste of James was not nice: and she became his avowed mistress… The necessities of the Churchills were pressing: their loyalty was ardent: and their only feeling about Arabella’s seduction seems to have been joyful surprise that so homely a girl should have attained such high preferment. – Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Ascension of James II.

The stately home stands stately in the dreamt-up

landscape. Looks cool when dawn has shaken off

 the darkness of the night and tossed her shawl of fog

over the shapely curves of hills: the human raised

to the sublime by rays of rising sun

reflected in the navvy-dug lake.

The neat hedgerows that parcel out the land

with equitable hand; fences and stiles

aiding our right to stride out through this husbanded

world: the cattle belled and timed; the furrows

measured and tilled and seeded with profitable

grain. Trees dot the landscape with gently

irregular rhythm; remind us of duty,

eternity, and demise. The general

and the particular entwined in the fractal

branches of the trees. And wild flowers

sown pseudo-random on the edges of fields

and ponds embellish the legacy of man

brought to his manhood among the mines, trenches,

and overseas plantations of England’s

green and pleasing land.

*

The ghost of Arabella sits on a stone thrown

casually into the mix in blasé  

imitation of nature. Squinting to shield

the blinding sunrise from her resurrected eyes;

fresh as a daisy or a mushroom sprung

from the underworld, and rebaptized with morning

dew; frowning to find herself frustrated (again)

and back in this benighted place once more; scowling

to think of all the wrongs done to and by her

over the years. So be it. Those many years

ago when she was still alive. There’s no

undoing it now. That bloody bell (what is that?)

now a-ringing in her ears.