ISSUE 13B
ALEXANDER SHAW – POEM
Up the Monument. Archival Photograph
A workman in a flat cap on his honkas
wraps three weathered fingers around the Earl’s
weathered coat. It’s nineteen sixty-four, Earl Grey
the cornerstone of a civic past
in need of cleaning up, or out. Upright
in a toggled collar, he smiles faintly
while the workman grimaces, polishing
this head of a head of government, less
a champion of civil and religious
liberty, as the plinth would have it, than
a constitutional tinkerer, whose purpose
was to preserve and not to overthrow,
leaving revolution to street preachers,
hippies, demos, out of camera view below.
Commissioned by Steps in Time by Newcastle Poetry Festival 2017.