NO HOME BUT THE STRUGGLE
You tread the edge
of this bright world
gingerly, unsteadily as if
for you it lay in shadows.
Old red heat grown dull
in the world still glows
in you: a bust of Uncle Joe
watches you dine
(cold commons in the kitchen
with the morning news)
and that photograph in passe-partout ñ
the comrades in the trenches
outside Burgos, 1936, all fags
and grins and black and white
bandannas. The flatís upstairs ñ
steeper every month ñ above
an Asian supermarket. Great confusion
yesterday when you asked
in early morning stupor
(stunned by a dream of Ronnie Gold
drunk in an alley after Cable Street)
for the Daily Herald.
Consternation too when leaning
on stick and counter you recalled
young Harry Patchett who,
in September í39, sung the Internationale
to his public as he clipped
their tickets on the 131
to Dalston Junction. Poor Salim ñ
too polite to interrupt ñ smiling
towards the shelves of catfood
planning reorientation round
a centralised display. Competitionís fierce
with Tesco by the roundabout.
Belts to be tightened, profits trimmed
this fiscal year. Family first,
family first. Oh, yes, they took
your family first: both grandparents
left the ghetto in a lorry ñ
Lodz had become too crowded
and they needed workers
somewhere east of the city.
Three years on you knew
the truth. You stood outside
The Eagle by Whitechapel Underground,
the letter in your hand,
and wept without a sound;
wept not just for a photograph
of Papi and Baba, stiff and grim
in some Carpathian valley,
but for a sea that parted
once again, but a different sea
a red, unfathomable tide in flood,
now and forever. You wept without
a sound, even as Whitechapel fell
about your ears in 1944.
And youíre weeping now
with a squeezy bottle of Domestos
in your hand, weeping
for another world
that never really wobbled
out of night and into dawn:
Uncle Joe, the Catalonian comrades,
Harry Patchett, Ronnie Gold,
the red blood of the Party
beating deep and strong,
all gone, all gone to ashes.
Salim looks around for his mother.
What to do? He seems always
so sad, this solitary pensioner
who drops his coins, forgets
to pay his bills. ìAnd whereî,
his angry mother whispers,
ìare his sons? Do they
not care that heís shaving
in cold water? What
of his church? Can they not
take him in?î They help him
to the door. He smells of piss.
They shake their heads
and lock up for the night.
Such times with fortune hostage
to the flagship enterprises. What
a world, such changes, revolution
turning on a dollar dropped.
Solly under a street light,
sodium shadows falling long
and ragged over the paving stones
that Hitler missed. What
a world, implacable, unchanging.
Solly treads the edge
of this dark world unsteadily.
4:21:00 PM 
|
