After the Plagues

we learnt to re-verb our city, re-moving

the hard, cold nouns of enclave, cladding, capital

Our language, like the shapes of our architecture

spoke of re-flocking, re-fellowing, re-wilding

re-spacing, re-purposing. Re-imagining –

a city of immunity, where our veins

and arteries flowed with green and blue and birdsong. The tongue

of the Thames licked our wounds, we sought out lifeblood

and welcomed re-fellowing the wild

We learnt to get our hands dirty in the rich

soil of allotments, bearing fruits that spoke to the mouths

of the thousand heritages blooming in our city. Seeds sent

in plump packets of potential across continents, found roots

Here – the locally grown bottle gourds, lotus, pomegranates

cassava, watermelons and callaloo – the emigre

waved the confetti of green and red over grey

We learnt to welcome the weeds that grew through cracks

making poetry in our pavements, the lion’s roar of golden dandelion

soon dissolving to clocks, floating flocks of time

draping the people in minutes and hours of

noticing. The soft rhythms of

the pigeon’s coo flying through the decluttered soundscape

over the patchwork pools of blue, we –

desterilised our city. We never forgot –

the eyes of the murdered young man who dreamed of architecture

staring out from the murals that garland old brick. We never forgot

the two dimensions of the pandemic when our grandparents’ world shrank

to rectangular screens and how they dreamed of blue and green

and fullness. We never forgot the rotten tooth of Grenfell black and stark

against a backdrop of luxury glass. A mirror and light to London

We learnt to ask

– how can we nest like this? How do we live inside our space better?

After the plagues –

we learnt to unfetter and re-stitch textures, scents, sights, sound

into the hems of our city. Art vaccinated architectural scabs

nature sprouted, things split down

to community level. We de and re – de-cladded and de-colonised our streets

re-pluralised power and re-purposed the anatomy of space, re-enchanted

our city with deep knowledge of people and place. After the plagues –

we saturated our city in the velvet earth of resolution and learnt the radical noun of revolution