Statues

The following inspired by discussions at the GU LitSoc. If I create a literary work per hot meal it is entirely legitimate owing to the GU LitSoc's free pizza policy.

Statues, or: a traffic-cone poem

At the end of Princes Street where Edinburgh meets the world
I met the Duke of Wellington. Command was written
On his bronze face beneath the bird-shit. His horse reared,
Lifting up the weight of its dark metal muscles,
While its mad rolling eyes said:
'Bugger me, not again!'

With one hand he made that gesture that builds empires up
And topples them and builds them up again - as if directing his battalions.
But where are those battalions? For it wasn't only Napoleon that this Iron Duke
Broke at Waterloo. Behind him, the Register House: the numberless battalions of the dead
Form their lines across paper in locked cupboards.

And in front of him, the station:
So I followed the orders of his imperious hand
And caught a train. I went to Nice, to Florence,
Munich, Krakow, Kiev; but everywhere some carved face sneered sternly down at me
And made me want to smash it, to bring kings and generals toppling,
Break them in their turn. There'd be no blood or breaking bones:
Sanctimonious stone faces would be kicked about the street for footballs.
But instead I retreated from sanctimonious stone gazes.

Until I came to Xi'an, where the dead battalions have their statues:
Nameless, but not faceless, they stand in their clay ranks - far easier to smash
Than bronze and marble. Some were smashed even in death, but all were smashed in life.
Enough of smashing, then.

But bring the marble kings together,
Put them in ranks as their clay subjects stand in ranks,
Make them share their podiums,
Line up their rearing leaden horses, as if to start a race:
The first to one million dead!
And let the terracotta soldiers give mute witness
And pass mute judgement.

My train pulled in - a little late - at Queen Street.
The Duke of Wellington greeted me again,
From underneath his traffic-cone.

I thought of Napoleon in a droopy false moustache,
Ceasar with a red nose on his Roman nose;
Hitler hung about with strings of pearls or wooly scarves
In a shop window; a half-peeled banana in Lenin's gesticulating arm.

And the mute clay ranks look on, and mutely smile.



The list of cities are all those twinned with Edinburgh on the Eurasian continent: we are indeed, by a happy chance, twinned with the home of the Terracotta Army. I did miss out Aalborg, because the Danes are much too lovable (there is a rough correspondence between the eastern marches of cities and dictators, France-Italy-Germany-Ecksovietlandia, and come on, name me one mass-murdering Dane).

Glasgow - to the immortal spirit of whose immortal people an Edinburgh boy humbly dedicates this poem, may it live and prosper when all kings and conquerors are buried up to their traffic-cones, hurrah! - is handily enough twinned with many cities that stand as democratic landmarks on the map of world history: Marseille where the song of liberty was sung, Nuremberg where kings and conquerors finally got what was coming to them, and Rostov-on-Don, home of the free Cossacks.

It is also twinned with Bethlehem. Naturally the revolutionary connection is there - Bethlehem, Palestine!, the information boards paid for by the Glasgow taxpayer inform us proudly - but of course that is not the first association with Bethlehem. Many people think it is the place where light, peace, and love entered the world. So I suppose it and Glasgow sort of balance out.

I mean, I am from Edinburgh, one has to keep up appearances.