It might try me accidentally to forget
And just lullaby to sleep,
Soothed by soft-words-of-mother,
Not to cry because it’s too sad, and if
All the noise kept carefully out
By, for example, newly fitted double glazing,
And who made that anyway?
And where did they get stuff to make it?
And whose bodies are buried inside white plastic?
If all the noise, or even just some of it,
Were to wake me up, I might never stop crying.
Poor me. It is all about me, isn’t it?
It might try me accidentally to forget
And it might succeed a bit and yet
Not stop the nightmare that with shrill voice shouts
‘Who built the rotting wooden posts
That kept the sea at bay so long
That gave you your shelter so that your you
Could order fish and chips and play on the slot machines to your dumb numb heart’s content?’
Voice! Voice! Slipping through cracks, falling
Through holes in the logic of carefully constructed arguments
And dissolving rocks and rotting wooden posts
With laughter mocking the idea implicit in so many of our actions
That things are just here for our enjoyment,
Without context or history,
Anaesthetised flesh,
Dreaming without knowing the dream is a dream
As if I deserved everything
Just for being little old me
As if I were my own achievement
Because I had the money which they invented and then gave themselves
And then bought everything which belonged to everyone else
And then told everyone else that if they wanted what we had stolen they had to get some money too
And that, by the way, we had all the money
So wha-tcha-gonna do?
‘So do not forget!’ the voice says
‘As you walk arm in arm with your own skeleton
Down the empty beech
Listening to the waves crash against the shore,
Do not forget that
This cliché feels wrong because there’s more
To it.
The empty beech
Is not empty.
Do not forget to ask who built the rotting posts.
Not forget to ask who saved your ***** white skin.
The empty beech is not empty.
The beech is full of everything
That it is not
Of all the things and people who kindly
Are not here
Who have withdrawn from view
So that you could have this moment walking solitary on the sand
And the clothes you are wearing
And your bones
Do not forget that all of it is on loan
Do not forget that, if special, you are so
No more than
A single grain of sand between your toes
Or the person in the crowd you fail to see tonight in the light’s glare’
‘Oh…sorry…hello!’
‘The forgotten but not forgotten
The dead but not dead
The ones who built the rotting posts.
Do not forget you owe everything to all of them
To all of it.
And do not forget to start paying your debts
While there’s still time.
Maybe start with a poem.
Try to make it good.’
This poem makes a pair with 'Footprints in the Sand'. After writing the first poem and feeling quite pleased with it in a kind of self-congratulatory way, I began to think about the enormous inherited privilege that meant that I could have the experience that gave rise to that poem, privilege that I did nothing to earn. The rotting wooden posts of the title appear in the other poem but there the question of who built them, whose sweat blood and tears have enabled me to leave footprints in the sand, is not asked.