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Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

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Lyn Moir

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Prague: Charles Bridge

They've let their guard down: no more telescopes
or microphones trained from the towers. As stalls
spring up like weeds, butterfly fingers dip
slyly into each strident foreign flower.

Severity has turned to carnival,
performances from end to end provide
stone kings with court and jesters once again,
with jewels, real and falsified; broad smiles

on every face, acquisitive, designed
to part discerning punters from their cash,
smiles gimcrack as the wares. Tourists don't care,
the city's spell disguises tawdry art,

and who'd deny them magic in their search
for an 'experience' to gloat over
at home? But on the bridge just as dawn burns
the dark away, when it is naked, stripped

of everything but saints austerely lined,
monarchs, astrologers and charlatans
still prowl the royal route, ignored in turn
by sundry drunken remnants of the night.

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