POEM - Collating Pebbles

I hear popular 

invidious distinctions 

made on the pages
of books and rhymes

reformulating history

as though belonging

a sense of place were a matter 

of the purity of its ingredients 

cooked in a mythic ancestral soup

selecting only the whitest pebbles 

from a beach of mixed aggregates 

wilfully ignoring the continental drift

the gravelled tides 

that brought everyone to an island

you really have to want to get too

our shingled beaches 

ever shifting in their formation

with each lunar cycle 

carry whatever flotsam 

the waves throw up

for we remain 

as ever we were

a resolutely mongrel nation 
our noble destiny our right of birth 

is to be cross bred 

via our estuaries and ecstasies 

by glorious virtue of evolutionary jism

with Neanderthal pebbles, 

Celtic pebbles, 

Roman pebbles, 

Scandinavian pebbles, 

Angle, Saxon and Jute pebbles, 

Norman French, Dutch and Andalucian

and any other exotic gene pebble 

we might pocket through our travails

through the gravel 

of this washed up lineage we have

absorbed cultures 

with the insatiableness of blotting paper

adventuring across seas

migrated seeking fortunes in 

foreign climes, 

conquered, quelled and capitalised

on the achievements of countless

civilisations whilst

we forged then forgot an Empire

that we ethnically cleansed 

of our sins and repainted beneficent 

should you chose to

though why ever should you 

define our nation by the narrowest alley 

travelled between one street and the next

then we all become foreigners, immigrants and refugees 

by virtue of crossing a road

become prey for territorial street gangs

lurking on the other side of an

invisible boundary line

someone thought up

on the back of a fag packet

we are all in a world wild search 

for a destination sublime

to find whatever our true home is 

and wherever we choose to land

humankind makes that 

into the flesh and bones of a nation

collated out of the inconspicuous ruins 

of our collective vagrancy 

our homelessness

we arrive

we settle 

and conjure

a less muddied destiny for ourselves 

with whoever we are with 

wherever it is that we are

nothing about a nation is eternal

nor sacrosanct 

we briefly share genetic time

together on a river

that floats us downstream

into a vast encompassing sea

in which we all become 

indistinguishable 

from water

in the end.

Written by Stephen Lumb February/March 2026