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.
By David Selzer