"I Don't Want to Take My Country Back..."

A guest post poem: "Ice Age" by Chip Hamer

Ice Age

(when the continent of Europe was covered by

an enormous glacier, and there were no borders)

As if cutting off your nose to spite your face was successful

cosmetic surgery, ‘the people of Britain have spoken’.

Democracy. Inaction. The body politic broken.

Bullshit, bluster, and downright lies, it’s no surprise

when the disenfranchised stick two fingers up

to the establishment.

Who knows what they meant? Who ruined race relations?

Who blamed immigration? Who supped with the devil

they knew was in the detail?

It’s an epic fail to understand exactly who it is

kicking your arse. When it’s the ruling class.

The whole damn thing was a farce.

Listen, let me articulate this clearly, understand

I mean it and when I say I mean it,

I mean it most sincerely…

I don’t want to

take my country back.

I want to take it forward.

Chip Hamer is a founding member of Poetry on the Picket Line. ‘Ice Age’ is from a forthcoming collection to be published by Flipped Eye.

(continued below the fold)

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Chip Hamer is also a long-standing friend of mine who I have known since whenever, one of those proudly solid music-loving lefties who never gives up on a fight for a better society, nor a quest for a good band. (He’s also a subscriber to this Substack.) As such, we are friends on Facebook, where Chip posted ‘Ice Age’ this week in evident response to the race riots in England being perpetuated entirely by English right-wing nationalist racists. Upon reading, the last stanza just hit me in the face, and a lot more pleasantly than a paving slab would. How has nobody else come up with this before - or if they have, why is it not in wider use?

Chip’s simple statement - “I don’t want to take my country back, I want to take it forward” - is equally applicable in the US, where Trump campaigned in 2016 under the slogan “Take America Back,” a statement being regenerated by his supporters in 2024.

If you live in the UK and Chip’s final sentence hits home as hard with you as it did with me, know that there’s already a ‘Take My Country Forward’ t-shirt you can buy, proceeds from which, according to tshirtme’s site, will “help frontline organisations supporting homeless people, food banks and refugees.”

The shirt is £18, but costs an additional £10 to mail to the US, so if any Americans on this page want to instigate an American edition, I’m sure Chip/Poetry on the Picket Line would be willing to approve it if proceeds could likewise be generated to a positive cause.

Thank you to Chip for permission to reprint, and of course, for writing Ice Age in the first place.

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And I will close out with a line I read this morning, written by Eric Weinberg in Ben & Me, the personalized biography of Benjamin Franklin I discussed in yesterday’s post:

“It is easier to deceive people than to convince them they’ve been deceived.”