James K Baxter, May 1963

Madame, I beg quarrel with
Your trip across the water --
Pig Island needs no English myth
To keep its guts in order,
Though our half-witted housewives yearn
At your image on the TV screen.

Forgive me that I cannot praise
The Civil Service State
Whose blueprints falsify the maze
It labours to create,
And plants above that sticky mess
Yourself in an icing sugar dress.

The dead who drink at Bellamy's
Are glad when the schoolkids clap
A Fairy Queen who justifies
The nabob and the bureaucrat,
In a land where a wharfie's daughters can
Marry someday the squatter's son.

While the stuffed monkey, dog and sow,
Play ludo in the void,
The Auckland pavements carry now
Six hundred unemployed,
And the bought clerks who sneer at them
Will crowd to kiss your diadem.

The girls at Arohata jail
Are very rarely dressed in silk-
Let us make a Glasgow cocktail
Bubbling cool gas into milk,
Drink up Mary, Kate and Prue,
No better and no worse than you.

Before my birth your soldiers made
A football of my skull
At Mud Farm when they crucified
My father on a pole
Because he would not take a gun
And kill another working man.

I give you now to end our talk
A toast you will not like:
McSweeney the Lord Mayor of Cork
Who died on a hunger strike
It took him eighty days to drown
In the blood and shit that floats the Crown

While Big Ben bangs out stroke on stroke
And the circus wheel spins round
The Maori looks at Holyoake
And Holyoake looks at the ground,
And there will be more things to say
When the Royal Yacht has sailed away.