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Yesterday
should have been a day in mourning:
bleak January, cold, field-fog hanging,
a war on the horizon,
the screaming of jets at the airport,
no-one buying Big Issues but me.
Me on Oldham Street,
past the tarot shop with gaudy nightmare painfaces patterning in the window,
past the pain shop with the skeletal dominatrix mannequinned in bony basque and skewering stilettos,
past the fifty p a pint pub where the oily boy made sly sexy eyes at the flabby girl -
the one with the brown gravy dribbling from her fingers as she eased a fat chip in his wet mouth -
past the halfboarded shop where you grind your way over crunching glass shards
to buy yourself a swishing cloak or a dalek arm like a sink plunger -
your permit to play with Doctor Who and your alien mates in a Saturday fantasy -
past the vinyl revival spun by the man with the haysmell joints and the heroin face,
past the formica-tabled halal takeout where the man with the Vuitton briefcase
was dripping Hammonds Brown Sauce on his slice of doner kebab,
past Tatoos to the Starz where the pierced model coiled and rolled his muscles
to unfurl a crouched scorpion with an inky blue sting in diabolical tail,
past the street-grimy window cluttered with Jamaican ganja and bongs like pipes bearing holy water,
past Magma with the slickly provocative German girls silkily posed on glossy expensive pages.
It should have been a day for mourning.
But piercing the sky, bravely thrusting its spindly twiggy arms to the sun,
was a single tree
held tight, warm, brave, embraced by a black chimney pot,
its roots secure
in the black soot.
Gwyneth Roberts 2002
Read Mont Huon
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