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slavery

DEVELOPMENT

Now the flyover has been demolished – that simple

solution to traffic congestion,

leaping over library, art gallery

and museum to disgorge suburbia’s

commuters into the city’s erstwhile

mercantile heart – when you drive down from Low Hill

on the new three lane carriageway, flanked

by immense hoardings for the latest movies

and multi-apartment blocks for students,

you can see the Duke of Wellington,

Protestant Dubliner, on his column

against the sky above St George’s Plateau.

 

His back is turned on the vestiges

of the Irish Catholic slums, and his gaze fixed

on the railway terminus. He was

a talisman for the merchants who paid

for his statue. He kept trade free for sugar,

cotton, and slavery.

 

 

SATURN’S CHILDREN

For Elise Oliver

 

A nine year old girl somewhere far to the south

or south east of here, somewhere beneath

an African or an Asian sun,

is making bricks – packing clay into moulds,

all day, day after day. In her teens

she may bear children who luckily may live

long enough to also make bricks in the sun –

and may also officially exist.

She does not. Hers was one of tens of millions

of unregistered births, phantom boys and girls,

marked out for the very worst of wrongs

our ingenious species can commit.

We in the North and the West – with our

insatiate, unappeaseable consumption

of the earth itself – are not only

colonising the planet’s future,

but are devouring it.

 

 

AFTER THE RIOTS

A skyline as idiosyncratic

as Manhattan’s, Chicago’s – its totems

of wealth, faith and dominion – belies

the city’s cruelty: fortunes from famine,

despotism, slavery; licensing

of squalor, bigotry and despair.

 

In the park where the Orange Lodge drummed out

The Twelfth, a rape was immediate headlines –

white girl, black youths. In Toxteth – its decayed

squares and terraces built on molasses

and cotton, some street signs repainted green,

gold, red, the colours of Rastafari –

was daubed, ‘Vote ANC’.

 

 

 

NOTE: The poem was originally published on the site in April 2010.

 

 

 

AFTER THE RIOTS

A skyline as idiosyncratic

as Manhattan’s,  Chicago’s – its totems

of wealth, faith and dominion – belies

the city’s cruelty: fortunes from famine,

despotism, slavery; licensing

of squalor, bigotry and despair.

In the park where the Orange Lodge drummed out

The Twelfth, a rape was immediate headlines –

white girl, black youths. In Toxteth – its decayed

squares and terraces built on molasses

and cotton, some street signs repainted green,

gold, red, the colours of Rastafari –

was daubed, ‘Vote ANC’.