Flag

'Each man had a liver, a heart, a brain,
and a Flag.
These were his vital organs.
On these his life depended.'

Christopher Logue, Professor Tucholsky's Facts

A rail journey westwards is a good place to start,
the country on rewind or fast forward, depending on your seat,
throws up sightings which get more frequent

as the train nears the sea - our flag, strung up on bunting,
hung like wet washing in back yards that echo themselves
down the terraces' hall of mirrors.

Or on the flat end wall of a Swansea gym,
fading to the east where an occasional sun
has ghosted the paint to a bad photocopy.

Or tied to the side of a SNAX caravan,
throwing fits on its pole, high in the motorway wind,
the beast of it struggling to exist.

And so suitable, that dragon,
the currency of legend, the tale
that is truer in its fiction than the facts can ever be:

an old country pulsing to be young
and blessed with a blind spot bigger than itself,
and of course with this flag,

spawning itself west, a strange flower that flourishes best
in the barest of places, or glimpsed above a town hall
on a horizontal pole, wrapped up in itself

A Chinese burn of red white and green,
a tourniquet, a bandage tight on the wound
staunching the dreams of what might have been.