Platform-7
Dec 7, 20132 min
Poet, Dzifa Benson
When I read the brief for this year’s Silent Cacophony activities, I immediately thought of a story I’d heard about an unexploded bomb dating from World War II discovered during Shepherd Bush Green’s recent refurbishment. It seemed the perfect location to combine with my poem. I wanted to recite my poem to as many people as I could accost on Shepherds Bush Green. Accost might seem like a strange word to use in this context but I’ve done this kind of “guerrilla” poetry before and the way some people react when you ask them if they’d like to listen to a poem makes it feel as if you are accosting them. Here’s the poem I performed:
The Poem
12 Questions
(After Carolyn Cole’s World Press Photo 2004 exhibit - Mass Grave, Liberia)
The roiling is stilled and
they lay in a deadlock
of handsome repose.
Young pups in formation,
whelps of men,
tail to a whisker
a son, an uncle
someone’s brother.
The vapour of life
smelling much like
rotten sleep
hovers over them
in shuddering denial
of its own departure.
A lone digit strokes
succour across a blood
speckled forehead
scant solace in this
sandy sepulchre.
At first, I saw nothing
more than a tumble
of scattered limbs
on some beach but
in the small hours
Carolyn’s third eye
closes in, unshrouds
the dust returning
to dust in a land
of diamonds in the rough
named Freedom.
Did they rip off toenails with a pair of pliers?
Did they leap in triumph, clacking tibias like maracas?
Did they sever a dreadlocked head and hold it aloft in the market place?
Did their eyes gleam red with the madness to come post haste?
Did they hand AK47s to children saying ‘the world is your oyster, swallow it whole?
Did they ram their points home, plundering young girls, losing their souls?
Did they forget ‘he killed their ma and he killed their pa’ and still vote Taylor?
Did they come a cropper in a demob of arms for dollars?
Did they yearn to spill blood, blood much redder than their own?
Did they become inured to all death even their own?
Did the future flash past them on a fiery road to nowhere?
Eaten up by history and bacteria, are they remembered somewhere?
See accompanying images and read more on this intervention here