To listen to an audio recital of the poem, click hereA Song in Welsh
By nativity
an Englishman - though far from native -
born among
“cor blimeys”, schooled in genitives and datives
by aged
paedophiles in gowns of greenish mould,
I fielded at
third man, a true child of the wold.
England was
all smug scones and snobbish sandwiches, complacent
cream teas
served to us outsiders in adjacent
rooms
adorned by statues of Disraeli and a King James Bible.
Shakespeare
on Saturdays, chapel on Yom Kippur, a tribal
amphictyony
of Houses named for English heroes of the glorious
past - a
past in truth less glorious than spurious.
Englishmen
inhabit England, a land that stretches east for ever,
to the
never-setting sun of Vikram’s corner-shop. But never
into Cornwall,
Ireland or the Scottish Isles - that land is Britain,
a land of
history and culture preferred untaught and left unwritten.
The English,
like their German and their Russian cousins, have their
Pales.
In
Anglo-Saxon the word for “foreigner” is “Wales”.
The OED
defines the wold as “open or uncultivated land”,
meaning the
downs and moors and peaks and mendips, the bland
infertile
viscera inhabited by sheep and yokels,
an English
city-dwellers traffic-jam in summer, elsewise a focal
point for
mockery in silly accents by those aspiring to the Greek
and Norman
modes of civilised barbarity.
Yet what they speak
is what I
speak, the tongue of the outsider, and our affinity
is rooted in
a common soil, a shared divinity -
not God, but
Hatedness, expressed contemptuously through
stiffened
lips that mutter hypocritic hymns from empty pews.
So it is not
strange that I, a Jew, grandchild
of the
stadtl and the ghetto, inhabit now this wild
hinterland,
this aboriginal viscera of the wold, this rustic fen,
and share my
song of strangerhood with British men.
"A Song in Welsh" is published in "Welcome To My World, Selected Poems 1973-2013", The Argaman Press. Click here to purchase the book.
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