poliphilo

This poem is sort of a companion piece to the one I posted yesterday. It was written a month or two later.

PANTOMIME WALL

Our garden wall is a slightly unnatural

Mauvey red. It puts me in mind

Of the flats we used to paint with bricks

For the parish pantomine- every brick

The same unweathered, unlichened, unscumbled,

Straight-from-the-paint-box red. The racists

Made me do it. They scrawled our wall

With a hate message in aerosol.

What could I do but paint it out

At once? I chose the brickiest red

In the cellar. Better a pantomime wall

Than one that 's shouting abuse at the neighbours.

Still I'm sorry to see how our wall

Stands out from the walls to left and right

Which are weathered, lichened. The whole row

That faces the ginnel is beautiful

With the falling down beauty of age and rot.

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