Victoria Street

Victoria, on your scarred witch body we build
palaces to celebrate what has been broken and look out
from inside the chest-bones of our church

to the radiant yellow eye of God until it winks below
the lowest horizon you have ever seen in paradise we
have taken the lawnmower to the garden you planted

left the starry heads of agapanthus splayed
to rot on the ground and the magpies warbling
gun-shy in the trees we have torn the pages  

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from every book you put to print and stopped
time in the clock tower we have this small power
why still do you struggle against

this unquiet revival beneath our feet, jackhammer hearts
bursting up like flowers into a blur of motion, fragments
of window glass regenerating the notion of ‘city’ and ‘jungle’

remembering our gardeners’ hands, we bury
our fists between cracked concrete slabs
to see what will grow.