Pat Ransford
New world order
February 1991
London’s wrapped in eerie white calm
as I take a walk
past the upside-down torches
of Nunhead’s iron gates of death.
In the Dissenters’ quarter
an obelisk commemorates
the five Scots democrats
sent to exile in 1793.
Their grim passage is aptly marked
by the black stone, raised
in these austere avenues of the dead
in 1851, by popular subscription.
Today, on its dial of snow,
it looks like a needle detecting change.
Snow reverses the landscape
unearths its bones -
in 1793 democracy was a threat;
last year too the world up-ended,
dissidents blinked from jail into power.
“Individuals may perish but truth
will prevail.” The obscure stone
looks lumpy and awkward -
a finger pointing to those strange
sudden times when change comes.
Crumbled by tree roots, stone angels lurch
as if into a resurrection dance
but stay in their frozen paradise
“Till day breaks
and shadows fee away.”
This dazzling whiteness
is after all a palimpsest of graves.
But hope
persistent as the urban fox
is writing new footprints in the snow.
Page(s) 23
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