Brothers Beneath the Skin, by Wyndham Nils Snowden

Preached the archbishop from his high gothic pulpit
After the choirboys' shrilling and the canons' Oxford roar;
‘England Home and Beauty
Are for those who do their Duty,

Respect the King, respect the Cloth, give honour to the Law. '
The communist made answer from his back room in Bloomsbury,
Marx and Lenin open by the Woodbines on the floor:
‘You may preach of Kingdom Come
But in factory and slum

Is brewing such a trouble as was never seen before. '
Then cried the tired mechanic with the good bones mechanically,
‘O I am fine and dandy and the master of my soul.

My granddad was a peasant
And it wasn't very pleasant

Without cinemas and birth-control and unions and the dole. '
Arrogant in answer spoke the massive humming turbines
Turning in the powerhouse like the grinding mills of God:
‘Little man in your manhole
You may stand at the control

But you're no more our master than a peasant with a hod. '
Cool in his clinic chimed the sexless psychoanalyst:
‘You may flap your little flags and build Empires overseas
But there's something lies behind
In the bad rooms of your mind

Made of father-hates, castration-fears, and such-like things as these.

Hotly they answered from their battleships and compounds,
Plethoric, bristling, turning red and white and blue:
‘You nasty little cad,
We've clean bodies; and, by Gad,

We'd rather have a dirty mind than be a filthy Jew. '
Thus said the poet in the prep room with his pretty ones,
Calling pukka sahibs and the soakers on verandahs:
‘Lo! The true-blue day has scrammed
When you Did and Iffed and Damned,

And all the jellybellies are as soft as baby pandas. '
Lightning-quick as Larwood cried the silly, silly cricketers:
‘Dirty little highbrow with your black and bitten nails,
We knew the Empire backwards
When you were learning sex words

And the lesser breeds of scribbler were hanging by their tails. '
Straight-mouthed the master, eternally quadrangular:
‘Oh purple men at tiffin with your horse-faced better halves,
Did you never stop to think
As you downed the sun in drink

That the bums you bruise and beat will have the last and longer laughs? '
‘Look what we have given them: God, and guns and discipline,
Syphilis and alcohol, and missionaries and whips. '
Came the cry beyond the waves
Of emancipated slaves:

‘We were doing very nicely till the white lord came in ships. '
‘You have stole my chanty metre', called
Kipling from the clouds, ‘And what you've written in it ain't no bleedin' earthly good;
You're a lily-livered pup
What should be delivered up

To do packdrill with the Horse Marines and Foot, which same are rude. '
Look, dead man, at this Empire, at this Eastscape of suffering,
Monocled glaucoma over India's coral strand.

They can hear in twilight Ealing
The forts fall in Darjeeling

As the last White Hope is snuffed out in that dark-skinned No-Man's-Land.

End of title