‘I cannot accumulate when others have nothing’

Now houses echo hollow in closed-door village winters,
lightless windows, a let of second-home silence, rental
high-water, never-ending moneyed off-shore-swells,
while he hand-threads still his sweated days with weaving
waves of bluff willow and Flanders red, until the contained
land curves with his fielded fences which will outlive these
drifting years.

‘All land is the common property of the human race’

His children’s children become sand-banked further out
until their family buoy-line’s lost. It’s a land of new absences,
a sapping of old known walls, how each street he takes
has forgotten its voices, the open gates of young beginnings,
how brick and mortar here ghosts days and nights with
impossibilities, how the desperate erosion of displacement
has the bloom and beauty of revolution.

‘landed monopoly has dispossessed more than half
the inhabitants of their natural inheritance, and
has thereby created a species of poverty and
wretchedness that did not exist before’                 
                           
Mary Gilonne is a translator living in France originally from Devon. Her collection Sublimity is published by Norfolk Publishing and her pamphlet Incidentals by 4Word Press.

Quotes from Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice that describes how rich landowners dispossess people of their natural inheritance. 

Poetry submissions to thursdaypoems@gmail.com.