Perfidious Albion
Surround of smoke and fire,
Blood in our salt sea;
Heed thy long days,
Thy face of complacency;
This land we forged from stone,
From tide to tide to dock,
Of foreign lands echoing aimlessly,
This land we have forgot.
To be sold, shamefully, painfully,
Our sweet tempest island, faithlessly, for
Our sometime Avalon,
With a golden heart from Gaul,
May have been fit, and greatly rife to dream.
And so, down goes Albion,
Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye,
Britannia, or whatnot.
In our own great plains to be shot,
Annulled, illustrious to be annulled,
By those who of us, know greatly not.
Oh thief, oh thief you, thou hast grasped a treasure - priceless hoard,
And Ha! although thy host were pleased to give it free,
Thy host lives not for England, but for reward.
For the river had truly flowed,
Bloody river, woeful rise,
We must be mad, truly mad,
But like the Oak, we hellish bode, and still cried,
To our daughters, whom we owed
A low and mournful plea,
For they learnt of free will to drown themselves,
In that damnèd river,
Involuntarily.
Oh where did he learn his trade?
Celt, Fyrdman or Dane,
Out on the North Sea-O,
Or so was conveyed.
Where are you?
Where are you, oh deadened
Grim hero, Martyr of old.
Saint Edmund,
Out on the salt sea-O,
Our strong, forlorn, and ever cold.
Across the bitter, tyrant sea,
Closing-in, alone thy rage is sworn
In blood, Willow blood and Oak vein,
Through a sacred taunt to find home, no stock to feign.
Dost thou know these moors, these elder lands?
And once thou is slain unto the earth,
Will thy corse rot in Albion or in treachery?
Kind Lancelot at Camelot, Oh fix thy mind
For a man whose mind is fixed is fortified,
And today it is the same.
We are a story, not a chance
For money, nor for economy; Thousands of years in forming,
Irreplaceable, like Beltane free.
But now we move quietly,
In lacking, day-to-day,
Through a culture hidden, declined
“It didn’t exist, anyway.”
A “Lyke-Wake Dirge” for a certain island people.
And so good luck to the ploughboys, our lads and our poppies,
For to maintain Her,
Whereever they may be, now.
And our bleeding daughters, now,
“Serve their time” now,
And die of scorn, by and by.
For the lark is in mourning and will not fly,
And ‘tis a new Danelaw that comes, while thy
Mind lieth not in preservation,
But in wretched condemnation,
And in the flooding of our ancient grounds
With our own blood of late -
Ah, though it reeks of a late haunt!
Spat on as for reigning in our own realm,
Taken down and made to bow, and relinquish our own:
Birthright, heraldry and hallowed wood, but God,
Oh God, we were never asked.
An’ now it’s dust that becomes ours,
When it’s dust that becometh of us.
How dare thy wretched tongue dictate to me my own good,
When it’s I who must house hell!
Yet don’t speak of how unjust, this world
Don’t be so quick to condemn.
What is good will endure and in doing so shall win,
And all will be well.
And if there is injustice - says he who calls any bloody lord Sir -
Well, Sir, may you with Oak bide;
And act thou justly,
La perfide Albion.
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