Cash Influence

Napowrimo April 16th, 2022

Write and a Curtal Sonnet. As a big Gerard Manley Hopkins fan, I could not resist this, even though I had already written a poem for today, which follows on after the sonnet.

Come give me love we hear you cry,
“Hear my song filled with words of worth”,
“Let me think for you, so you no longer weep”.
But vacuous is your cash-till lullaby.
So soft your hands that never toiled the earth,
Yet ferocious are those fiscal fists that the adman’s payments seek.

But here’s the trick, I hear my children say,
They’ve made more already than you have since birth.
At this eviscerating truth I could almost weep,
The jinn are out, there’s the devil to pay,
Cash influence is deep.

Set in Stone

In a Devon churchyard,
Beneath the sagacious Yew,
Whose evergreen needles
Saw Normans come and go,
They sleep.

Six feet deep beneath
Orange sedimentary clay
Settled are their bones.
Long-time laid,
Much longer made.

My DNA that saw Napoleon fall
And the coming of steam,
Greeks fighting Turks
Peru set free
And Victoria’s Empire dream.

Their children would
Tend to the sheep in their
Great Grandfather’s keep,
And his pinfolds so small,
Unlike his damp, once Saxon Hall.

Five generations have come
And gone, since they laid that stone
Which bears my name.
And my children’s too,
Is there engraved.

In the rock so clean
Formed by mountains and seas
By those who rose and fell
In trillions of shells
To mark my passing.