Rip Bulkeley

Oxford, UK.

 

Rip Bulkeley founded Oxford’s thriving Back Room Poets in 1999. His collection War Times was published by Ripostes in 2003, and he has edited Poems for Grenfell Tower (Onslaught Press, 2018) and Rebel Talk, forthcoming from Extinction Rebellion Oxford. He is also a historian of science, and in 2014 his book about an early Russian Antarctic expedition was awarded the Anderson Medal by the Society for Nautical Research.

 

Two poems - The Other Dead   -   George Floyd’s Future

Written 10th April 2020

 

The Other Dead

for my late friends Nick Allen, Lorna Barr, and Elizabeth Dawson-Bowling

 

In Brussels, the Musée des Beaux Arts is closed

until Quasimodo Sunday – some hopes.

Across the world, marinas crammed with

expensive, delicate boats are off-limits

to irresponsible parties. The aged especially

are barred from gathering in expectation

of nativities, miraculous or otherwise.

Few children are out there skating

in either hemisphere, but all are on thin ice.

As for torturers, they must find social distancing

a hindrance even from horseback. The labourer

still stands to the plough, the shepherd

at the fold, but for how much longer?

If they turn away from all other deaths

it is not because they have none themselves.

Yet for those who suffer ineligible loss

from causes that were not the plague

let neither sunshine nor the turning

of the stars dare plead necessity

to mitigate the cruelty of the times.

 

 

This is a conversation with Auden’s 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”. To revisit that famous text, and some of the pictures by Bruegel the Elder to which Auden was responding, go here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musée_des_Beaux_Arts_(poem)

Quasimodo Sunday is one of several names for the Sunday after Easter.

First published in the Oxford Magazine

9h June 2020

 

 

George Floyd’s Future

 

How inexhaustible the world is, always

producing something new, something

universally unexpected. Those untold

millions can die for thousands of years

from a great evil, whether cornered and alone

on some deaf street, or by routinely recorded

cattle truck. Then almost nothing, just another

ordinary foul murder with society officially on hold

in time of plague, and the planet ignites,

unselfish crowds demolish the assumptions

of ages, and a line is drawn across which

there can be no retreating. An anniversary crowded

with Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, Oscar Wilde, and

the national liberation of Argentina, must now

find one more space on the podium, and that

will be at the front. No more back of the history bus.