OUR SUNKEN HISTORY

Photo by Maria Ilves on Unsplash

Taxis through rain streets.

You cannot just move here.

Nothing makes sense since

this place started vanishing

becoming more beautiful.

Tiny details to a dying man

on buildings unseen when

you assume bigger worries.

---

A redbrick island on the Thames.

Half castle, half a jutting boat.

Any of it seems prelapsarian if

surviving aloof, welcoming me

as I find sunken bits washed up.

It's never flooded. Anglo-Saxons

dropping their broken axes?

Let’s not mention them.

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We lived in leaky huts

till invaders built London.

Then Khan’s father drove buses

and the last King of Scotland

taught us Tudor history from

the colours of English cheese.

Didn’t you know that the

Arabs invented gravity?

---

No one speaks truthfully.

Those who do lose their

tongues, torn out weeping

roots which won’t regrow

since what we had inside was

given away to a stifling mass.

Slowly first through sacred diversity

unstoppable now you cannot ask why.