Hampstead
Rank with heartache
Are the voices from past you hear
Upon these winding streets
Fitted with cobblestone memory.
The unsung builders’ song
Whose lives’ from birth to fading
built these red brick homes.
Of a wealth that flooded
From colonized mothers chapped hands
and the lashes of colonized sons.
What place have I amid these buildings?
Zeitgeist of the world,
Kala, give me your indifference
So I might numb my mind
And continue on to the happy bar
across the street.
But everywhere come looming forms
Significance, meaning and resonance in my blood.
Shaped city trees cut and pruned to height
Exploited from growing large and long
Thrust into the paved and asphalt
Roads, like the lives of those whose labor
Grew the homes of other men.
What far reaching corner of the earth
Paid in freedom and life for this brick I touch?
Red earth compressed, the heaving sigh
Of an empire built on the backs of an enslaved humanity.
Earlier on the doorstep of Keats house
I heard the words of the nightingale poet
But not in his voice but in brown and black tongues whose tropic heartbeats
Muscle, bone and marrow gave him
His circumstance.
Now in the night at my feet another doorstep,
that of a barbershop, tomorrow's papers
Calling the end of an old order.
The crown and the obelisk reminders of an age
That has fallen but remained.
The stone and the diamond outlive us all
Remind us of the mangled movement of history
And the sharp rise and dull fall of nations.
