Fish and refugees, postscript

Because the commonwealth will come and help us

Because we were raised on these myths

That Johnny Foreigner loved the way we give it to em

Because coal black, white tooth sambo

Will offer up his bowl

In exchange for a touch of British class.

Because they were lucky to have us

We were raised on these myths.

What have they done to Greece?

To Sumeria?

Ruins now and aped in architecture

The house that power built and myths

Stripped and shipped and worn

Like ermines of our time.

Do they build like Christchurch in Korea?

Will we who first burnt coal be remembered in our forms

Will they read Shakespeare and Newton any more

Like Pythagoras and Homer

Will these stories fur our descendants shoulders

Even as their great arc breaks on this new era's shore?

The myths don't tell you
That we dismantled the cotton industry of India
For the mills of Manchester

Dismembered the Ottoman Umma when oil was new and cool.
Fought the Chinese for right to sell them smack
Fought them again to sell them more.
Murdered the Irish for nine hundred years,

James, Henry, Cromwell, the blight,

Filler on the Western Front.
Armed Benin to enslave the Gold Coast, Guinea
Then broke them in debt

Our myths don't record this
But the Irish, Chinese, Ghanaians, the Indians

They all have their own myths.

Our myths speak of a heroic past

When pith helmets paved the way for God

And God spoke in English

When we bought trade to backwaters

And illiterates ululated, encircled, enthralled

Crowned us with garlands and feathers
Showed us gleaming treasures which we took.

Our myths never say that maybe they
Expected garlands back.

And so we go
Cap proudly on our head

And offer up these myths to the French
Who we fought for five hundred years
And sneered at.
And Germans, who we fought and humiliated

The Italians who we fought, the Austrians and Hungarians

Who we defeated. The Dutch for whom we invented
Concentration camps.
And the Spanish where we've got a rock

Stuck like a pile in their butt

And say give us this, for these myths

But they have their own.