Hi everyone,

It’s been a lean few months where I haven’t managed to write anything. No progress on my book for ages and not even more than a tiny poem to show. Until now!

I was in Essex for Christmas, in the town where one Matthew Hopkins did his horrible work drowning and torturing women suspected of witchcraft. Walking around the place, I was struck with an overwhelming sense of shame and sadness in the faces that I saw. I started to conjure a sense of shared guilt, a hidden well of negative energy that the people there might be trapped in as the descendants of people who looked on as these hideous acts were perpetrated.

What do I ignore around me that I should be shouting about? What do we all collectively go along with that four hundred years from now will seem barbaric? I don’t know. Here is my poem, anyway. Sorry it’s not a more upbeat piece. At least he got some measure of justice in the end, dying of tuberculosis which must have felt like drowning in his own bed.

Anyway, Happy New Year.

Richard

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Where the Thames opens its mouth,

Spewing out washed scum from the city,

A tiny place in England’s south,

Is scarred by sin and wants for pity.

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Painted houses, facades, veneers on rotting teeth,

Leaves a green that doesn’t glow like life,

Everywhere water oozes from beneath,

Reminder of him who brought the strife.

---

Hopkins, a name known for years and miles,

Who by the brackish waters made his home,

A reason for the downcast eyes and mirthless smiles,

Attached to faces that here sullenly roam.

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We killed women here, not just him but us all,

Passing gossip and dropping eagerly to crawl.

We who shrank away like Adam at the fall.

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With mandate, this man did wantonly take,

Twenty shillings a town and then begin,

For Devil marks their bodies to comb and hair to rake,

Stab and prick and scratch and cut their skin.

---

Tied to a chair without sleep for days,

Then, while we watched; just watched,

Flung from the banks to die in the worst of ways,

Their legacy; marks on a bedstead notched.

---

And then, when done, some justice was to spare,

For retiring to the Thorn, his lair,

He couldn’t breathe and fought for air,

Like his victims he submerged into despair.

---

Not four hundred years have passed,

No evolution of our kind of which to speak,

We can all protest and look aghast,

Distance ourselves from that horrible past,

But see those people in that town; the lookers-on,

They wear the shame of times not gone,

It lingers on and haunts the town,

Where the waters rise and seek to drag them down.