Puritan Left

A Passion to Purloin?

What’s left of the pure
Is it the morning sun?
Where is the passion,
For the heart or the gun?
Performance and profit
Wherever they turn
Rightward or leftward
For mammon they yearn.
Cromwell in Erin
Or in Panama with Sullivan
Duty and diligence
Death’s purity demands
Lashes at home
Famine abroad
Slavery, penury
The virtue in fraud.
Morning sighs
Abolitionists’ prayers
Venomous vespers
With McNeil and Lehrer
Were Puritans free
Witches to spurn
With Black slaves
on their angry God’s
thread to burn,
Livid and vivid
The rage of the Left
Assuaged by the embers
Charred severed members
Waiting in turn
In hypocrisy churned.

Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (Maisonneuve Press, 2003).

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This article was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2017 at 8:03am and is filed under Poetry.