Border Zone

John Agard

• Verlag: Bloodaxe Books
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781780375892
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Poetry

John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 40 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. His ninth Bloodaxe collection, Border Zone, explores a far-reaching canvas of British/Caribbean transatlantic connections, sweeping across centuries and continents. His border territory ranges from Love in a Sceptred Isle, a novella-like narrative poem of a romance between Barbados-born photographer, Victor, and Welsh librarian, Rhiannon, told with lyrical tenderness and thought-provoking wit, to Casanova the Philosopher, a sequence of sonnets in the voice of the legendary Venetian philosophically observing 18th-century English ways in a tongue-in-cheek memoir and travelogue. This is a diverse collection where the thought-provokingly mischievous, bawdy and elegiac rub shoulders alongside the sequence The Plants Are Staying Put – with the poet turning overnight lockdown gardener – as well as calypso poems, where the Guyana-born winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry puts on his hat as 'poetsonian', a term he coined in the 80s in tribute to the inventive lyrics of the calypsonian, a crucial strand of Agard's varied, innovative, and often satirical poetic output.

NAVIGATING CONTINENTS

35

Flag Speaks

1

I’ve come a long way

from ribbons

on spears

and garlands

of feathers

heading a fanfare

of tribal others.

Now nations march

to the grammar

of my squares

and rectangles

(not to mention

the odd triangle).

On grand parades

you’ll see me displayed

to the height of my glory.

The centre of ritual attention.

But I stay calm and carry on

as any flag

worth its weight

in cloth would do

2

up a pole

down a pole

ever playing

my starring role

in the fabric

of a nation’s unfolding

of what’s known

as Independence. 36

How I have danced

in the neutral breeze

for monarchs overseas

and seen the colours

of myself reshuffled

for the long shackled

about to step

into their own stride

3

for I too have heard of that feeling

called national pride

from the well-informed lips

of the transatlantic winds

that keep me flapping

as well as up-to-date

on history’s shifting weight,

those winds that bring me tidings

of risings and uprisings,

of timely severings

from a mother country’s

absentee apron strings,

a people defined

by Empire’s still visible spectre

rebirthing into their own mirror.

And so at midnight’s chime

I become a banner

for a milestone beginning

hoisted skywards

as a fluttering monument

to the future.

And when freedom tolls

see how I lord it

up my stately pole

to trumpet and drum roll 37

And in the reckoning hour

when old rages grow mute

I command

a multitude’s salute

and a speechless minute

falls across the land

4

oh what would

the United Nations

the Commonwealth

the Latin American Confederation

the Arab Emirates

(in short the globe)

do without the likes of me

and all my colourful kin?

We whose silent tongue

is flaunted in the wind.

Therefore unravel

what hidden meaning you will

from my flying

geometry of colours.

5

full-mast

I am an emblem

of protocol and celebration.

Half-mast

I am the drooping shroud

of mass lamentation.

To you who wave me

from the bonded crowd

what words can a flag offer

beyond the fervour

of slogans

that shadow my rainbow? 38

Yet since a flag also knows

how it feels to be thrown

to the fury of flames

(and I shall call no names)

on behalf of every flag

I ask of all who wave me to order:

am I the mere cloth you brandish

to a marching creed

basking in the vanquished?

Or am I a nation’s handkerchief

flown from a flagsta...