UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
One early afternoon at the nadir
or the zenith of the so-called Cuban
Missile Crisis – a good or, rather, bad
two years before ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and ‘Fail-Safe’
were screened – I was waiting in the drear
and white-tiled catacombs of Liverpool’s
Central Station – where it always seemed
as if it were night and the blitz still on
and water appeared to drip continuously –
for the next train, under the Mersey,
to Chester, when I heard somewhere beyond me,
somewhere unidentifiable, a loud,
continuing roar like boulders crumbling
or, more likely, city blocks tumbling
onto the streets above and I feared
that either or both the shoe-thumping
Premier and the tanned President
had advanced Armageddon. I believed,
then, rhetoric and realpolitik
were one so the momentary fear was
visceral.
The Soviet Empire has been demolished,
the American reduced, not least
its consumption of Havana Cigars,
but Cuba welcomes all tourists, though those
with only U.S. dollars to exchange
are surcharged.
John Huddart
November 12, 2012Now here is genius at work – or rather magic! To range from such precise recollection of a distant time [still acutely observed as if today] and to place it so adroitly next to a reference to modern Cuba, is almost beyond mere praise!
I need hardly add, that this is a poem of the year, as far as I am concerned.
Alex Cox
November 22, 2012I remember, very distantly, some huge victorian apartment blocks (is that what they were?) opposite Lime Street Station, where the ‘new’ St Johns Market now stands.
Was it the demolition of those massive buildings that you heard, in Central Station?
David Selzer
November 24, 2012They were certainly Victorian, Alex, but I can’t remember their function. What I heard was the collapse of the edifices that line/lined Bold Street, Church Street, Lord Street, Dale Street…
Catherine Reynolds
September 4, 2017Visceral. It takes me back to my CND protest march days against cruise missiles. Lest we forget!