Houses of Parliament

A ripped Union flag is limp in a tree.

Adjacent to the Houses of Parliament –

a Gothic revival currently crumbling –

these pleasant tree-lined and lawned gardens were once

a sewerage works and riverside jetties.

 

From the embankment the silhouettes moving

to and fro on distant Westminster Bridge

are like figures in a shadow play.

Below on the narrow strand strewn with rubble

is commotion. Two Egyptian geese –

imported as ornamental wild fowl

during the Glorious Revolution –

are urging their brood of four goslings

upstream with warning calls, meanwhile mobbed

by two Grey-legged and two Canada geese.

 

Emily Pankhurst in stone declaims, beckons.

Rodin’s black bronze Burghers of Calais

seem bemused by royal whimsicality.

Close to the site of the planned but disputed

Holocaust Memorial a shape

in a sleeping bag lies near the lawn’s edge.

It moves as a group of language students pass.

Safer to try to sleep rough in loud daylight.

 

Buxton’s abolitionist memorial

is illustrated with Aesop’s fables.

The slave tells us how the boar and the lion

stop fighting, realising that only

the vulture will win.