Old Europe Stared at Her Breakfast by Jennifer… | Poetry Foundation

(US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed those European countries which opposed the US attack on Iraq as only ‘Old Europe’)

Old Europe stared at her breakfast,

buttered her croissant, sipped coffee

which tasted like a gun

and blinked her grey eyes to restore the sun.

Old Europe grasped at the old A.J.P. Taylor

line, ‘but in politics the impossible

always happens’ more and more, hoped

for example, that the fact that the ‘plant’

for weapons in Northern Iraq was shown

on the BBC an empty ex-Media

Centre, and miles away a plain village,

hoping not to be bombed, because by

mistake young Colin, who apparently

mistook often, used its name

at the UN as that of the ‘plant’,

would be accepted as a fact and then

protected, thought Old Europe

as her France loved to protect facts,

as her Germany to act, or her Belgium to be. But,

she reflected, in doubt and in debt,

the future is not an ally

over the sea which just needs to be

convinced but a masked soldier, dead

to Agincourt, Darmstadt, Verdun,

wanting oil and meat and not

understanding how a continental breakfast

keeps the blood in your head, your brain

not your gut. Old Europe set her spine

straight in the doorway sun. Her hand

crumbled bread as if it were old bone.