[PIGEONS]
(Composed prior to 1971; no known manuscript; reconstructed from memory by Editor. A few lines I have not been able to remember.)Comrades, the citizen pigeons are holding a protest meeting.
Privileged, puffed-up and as scruffy as students
They dispute amongst themselves both the quantity and the quality
Of the bourgeois-distributed breadcrumbs.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But the pigeons ARE fat and the breadcrumbs ARE free.
A splinter-group burbles in disgruntlement
As petulant as provincial poets.
“The scenes down south” Man, Trafalgar Square! All that free corn!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
so, citizens, if you please
To now compose your internecine squabbling
I might incline to offer you
Some flakes of red New Zealand cheese!
Across the square, the mob flock
Like a blue version of that horrifying old newsreel. In shock
Or possibly surprise, a child claps.
Whirrawhirrawhirra!
The riot, disrupted, disperses.
Finito. Save for the leaving, upon the walls of my battered,
bedaubed and beloved city
Yet another spattering of revolutionary White!
