I looked up on Brixton High Street

and red clouds filled the air

with the taste of iron and the

smell of vile machinery.

 

Under the engines lay London’s

flimsy houses and lidless gardens. 

And the only blithe thing was

the foxes who gathered in knots

 

at street corners and moved

in lines through the coral night.

If we burn the blue flag, they say,

dragons will come free, and English

 

knights ride from caves with boots

and bottles – the sad, the brave

and the broken – and we will have

toppled New Jerusalem.

 

And in the ruins we will have to sift for love;

glass beads of love picked from the bricks

and rubble; rags and bones of love, dented

pans and kettles of it, bent girders of love.

 

Let us hunt the lost pins of love that our

mothers wore in their hair under shudders

of war, the playground loves of brothers-

forever, the love made in burnt-out bus-stops

 

under red Bollywood skies – even the love of

foxes that come with amber eyes, wild cries of

from fox-planets we cannot visit.  Let us be

humble: let us find the love at our feet.