Contributor's contribution: The fate of nations, the importance of record

Westphalia. Waterloo. And now? Man frage nicht: Don't ask.

M.E. Grey is a Brussels-based poet who humbly suggests, for those reading this on a mobile device or otherwise small screen, to go horizontal.

Photo by Linus Sandvide on Unsplash

You’re not regretting the exit of the grown-ups from the room, are you? Remember who they were. Remember what they did.

T.J. Clark, “The Job” (4 Dec. 2025)

Runnymede

The exact
                  spot
where
           King John signed
is
     where?

This meadow
                        shaped
by centuries
of agriculture
river management—
the seal was placed
hereabouts
on a document.

Go hunting
                    for
the coordinates

A certain number of minutes west
of the meridian
in a system which
at the moment of signing
is still hundreds of years from conception
(that concept made physical in
a few beams of brass
laid in pavements in Greenwich,
marked sporadically elsewhere too).

This meadow,
birthplace
(metaphor – no head
breached into air here)
                 of
                      democracy
(a term that does not feature in the charter
it’s a claim made later on
our amorphous body
politic).

How tightly
we want
to define
provenance.

As in a few square kilometres
between
Waterloo and Brain l’Alleud
the fate of nations
and their management of people
turned
six centuries and a few weeks
later.

Civil code, common law -
these are things
people sometimes
                                 discuss

And on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon
it can be nice to go somewhere
and fit square concepts
                                          briefly
into round placename holes

Then a cup of tea
and the drive home.

Special Military Operation

You believe in the importance of record
from every perspective, and the changes wrought
day by day. But you have no desire to record
your changing thoughts, your feelings, on the specifics
of this infolding crisis. You manage to summarise, barely:

Sometimes dumbly transfixed. Sometimes
thinking of a small contribution. Occupied
by a broad and shallow dread, except sometimes
lapsing abstractly curious, and then—tasks
and anyway—proximate things.

Your knowledge such a small fraction, but knowledge
enough of the inadequacy of anything
you get to feeling. All surface, no edge:
this is not a young person’s poem.
It is barely a poem at all.

						March 2022

This contribution is dedicated to the Austrian writer and publisher, Karl Kraus (1874-1936). He founded Die Fackel (The Torch), a satirical magazine, in 1899. When Hitler came to power next door in 1933, his words failed him. All he asked was “frage nicht”: don’t ask.

His critics assailed him for his silence. In his defense, Brecht wrote: “… silence steps before the judge’s bench / removes the cloth from before its mouth and / declares itself witness.”

Then, as now, we are reminded that the pen may be mightier than the sword—but the swordsman, just as much as the satirist, is able to wield it.

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