Streatham Hill

[Clodhopper]

Streatham Hill

Looked across the fence

One end of summer afternoon,

Smiled, and met the neighbour:

Secateurs and roses, heavy headed red velvet

Pulsing with life. Her gardening glove

Exposed tatooed numbers: blue-grey

Ink fuzzing with age. Six digits? Seven?

So many deaths in those blurred figures.

In Streatham at teatime on a t-shirt day

Dachau opened its eyes and stared

From behind a fence. Its wires slashed

Between us, electric, uncrossable.

Inside the house

Was a long-dead pre-war Poland, perfect

To the last detail of wooden panels,

Stove and icons - a last defence

Held, somehow, through every horror

And rebuilt.

Those blurred blue-grey numbers

Veiled the house and made it

Holy, a living cenotaph,

With roses.



By Clodhopper.

[RedGlitter]

Beautiful.

And so necessary.

[Clodhopper]

RedGlitter: The shock of that moment is still with me and I want it to stay. I remember how my eyes tracked what her hands were doing as she cut the roses and how the numbers appeared as she reached slightly forward. I don't recall what I was saying at that moment, but my words stopped as if she'd cut them, not a rose stem and my eyes went wide and snapped up to meet hers. I saw how she knew what I'd seen and was waiting, with a certain grim amusement, to see how I'd react - perhaps to see if I even knew what those numbers meant. I located my bottom jaw somewhere near the ground, and carried on talking as if nothing had happened.

I tried in the poem to get that sense of a lightning bolt coming out of a cloudless sky and that sense of how, fifty years later, it was still literally a live issue. Also that an experience of that sort will always be a barrier between someone who has had it and someone who has not. Shudder. The price for some knowledge is just too high.