Bottles in the Bombed City

They gave the city a stroke. Its memories

are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.

Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century

and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget

now squares with another. If the word is Manchester

it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.

To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload

of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.

Now Engels supports Max, and the British Union

of beautiful ceramics is being shovelled up,

blue-green tiles of the Corn Exchange,

umber gloss bricks of the Royal Midlands Hotel.

Unmelting ice everywhere, and loosened molecules.

When the stroke came, every bottle winked at its neighbour.

Copyright Credit: Les Murray, “Bottles in the Bombed City” from Subhuman Redneck Poems. Copyright © 1997 by Les Murray. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Source: Learning Human (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998)