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.