A Poem by Robert Selby

from The Kentish Rebellion: Part 1, IX

An Army of strange monsters, having heads of Enthusiasm, their bodies of
Antinomianism, their thighs of Familism, their legs and feet of Anabaptism,
their hands of Arminianism, and Libertinism, as the great vein going through
the whole.
– Thomas Edwards, Gangraena

Convening at Knole in the Poets’ Parlour
(named for poets as yet unborn),
they use Lady Sackville as serving maid
to their carousals, swill from gilt and ivory horn.

They sequester our houses and our woods;
proposition our money, plate and horse.
Our considerable assessments pay our own molesters –
bands stationed on every frontshire and pass.

Neighbour is encouraged to turn informant
on neighbour; a party in local dispute
for expedience accuses the other of Royalism.
Kinship’s entwinements are rotting at the root.

And when the wood is cleared and the soil washed
away, there will be the wasteland
they desired: all level, each equal with each,
equal in possessing nothing and equally damned
for disinheriting the unborn – an unforgivable breach.

The community keeps indoors
out of this army’s rapt eyes –
who relieve themselves in the fonts
so children go unbaptised.

They went to a gentleman’s stables,
took out a horse, brought it into the church
and there crossed its head with font water,
the vestments besmirched,

used to dress up one of their number
as Godmother. At Wickhambreaux
the table was found railed off in the east:
they hanged twelve from the presiding yew.

We are living in a time when all things sacred
are throughout the nation demolished
or profaned.
We all must submit to a militant virtue
as stifling as the sin at which it is aimed.

Robert Selby’s debut collection, The Coming-Down Time, was published by Shoestring Press in 2020. A book-length sequence, The Kentish Rebellion, is forthcoming in July. He edits the online poetry journal Wild Court.