Poem of the week: Chrissy Williams – ‘The Burning of Houses’
It boasts poems with titles like “On Getting Boney M’s Cover of Mary’s Boy Child by Harry Belafonte Stuck in my Head” and “Robot Unicorn Attack”. Don’t let the references to pop culture fool you; there is nothing zany or twee about her work, as “The Burning of the Houses”, about the London riots of 2011, reveals.
Tottenham is on fire and I work in an arts centre
where the sky is blue and I can hear birdsong
from a sound installation of birds
cooing outside my office window.
This is London. Hackney is on fire now
and Jamie is looking up from his desk.
He stops working. He tweets that that he can see
people smashing up a bus. He says there is a car
being soaked in petrol. He asks if there is someone
in that car. He tells us that car has been set alight.
This is London. Croydon is on fire now
and Anna is Facebooking furiously from Manchester
calling everyone bastards for doing this .
I am watching the BBC and reading Twitter
flicking between #LondonRiot and my friends.
Sometimes you can be proud of your friends.
I remember when Bianca came to stay
and we got tickets to watch ‘The Night
James Brown Saved Boston’ in the QEH.
People are getting hurt. Television isn’t going
to save us. But it’s okay now, some of my friends
are linking to videos of kittens which must mean
everyone is fine. This is London. It is on fire.
I go to bed while it is burning. I wake up
and parts of it are still burning.
You can borrow Flying Into the Bear by Chrissy Williams from the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. Tel: 0131-557 2876, e-mail [email protected] or see www.spl.org.uk for details.