September proves indifferent to the contest of statues.
Robert E. Lee meets his Waterloo. James Cook’s buried in a foreign field,
forever England. Ozymandias sneers at the clouds. Saddam Hussein jeers at
crowds. Pull them down, or make some more. The Empress of India converses with
its President, albeit stonily. Vladimir Lenin and Nicholas Romanov stand down
from their pedestals, join the parkland’s thronging chessboard. Or rewrite the
plinth: ‘Bumped Into The East Coast By Chance, Left Soon After’, ‘Erected To
The Memory Of The Wrong Side Of History’. Or transport them to the Relic
Museum, with imperious Caesar, dead.
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