The Morlock’s Arms
The wasps are big this year, the meteors
green in the summer night. Our land
ironclads are far away, our flying-machines
visit atrocity on innocence. We do not care.
This is the World State. We’re a planet now.
Our empire was the sun,
famine or fusillade its worst extreme,
its best a world that turned
on a war we fought, in the air.
And we’re still here, in the light,
we Morlocks, we whose corpses
rotted conveniently in the cosy catastrophe,
we feckless, toothless proles, feral cattle
for whom entropy was never cool.
No Empire now, nor New Jerusalem,
no Modern Utopia. Only the streets
of Earth and England
and a sense of something about to happen.
Because we never went away
we will think of something
in our own time, gentlemen. Please.
Ken MacLeod was born on the Isle of Lewis and lives in Renfrewshire. He is the author of seventeen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to The Corporation Wars: Emergence (Orbit, 2017) and many articles, stories and poems.He edited the Scottish Poetry Library’s online anthology Best Scottish Poems 2015.