There was abundant water from the hills, that once
had been wooded. Under heath and pasture
there were seams of coal and clay deposits
to drive the factory engines and build
the chimneys, which were made by ambitious,
ingenious men for ambitious,
greedy men. The small town became a large town,
and then a city. Tenements were built
for the poor, who had come from hamlets,
at the distant end of tree-lined lanes,
to be less poor. The river, whose source
was in the hills and along whose banks
people had first settled aeons ago,
became, in a decade, an open sewer.
The old men who had become rich because
they owned by chance a lucky piece of land
decided to build a library – leeward
of the prevailing wind – so as to grace
the centre of their famous city.
It would have a Grecian portico
for its entrance, upholstered chairs, and shelves
of mahogany for leather-bound books,
ancient and modern, on all the sciences
and the arts, and the history of the world.
They wondered if a clock were needed –
and then remembered they owned each second.
They had commodified time. What the place lacked
the old men realised – and they were all men,
and only men who owned part of the earth –
was a wind dial so that they might travel home,
after improving their minds, to their mansions
in the foothills, unassailed by acrid
factory smoke and the cloying miasma
from the tenements and the river, but knowing
their fortunes were assured.
By David Selzer