Postcards From Malthusia DAY NINETY-SEVEN – Niall McDevitt

To the Statue of Baroness Thatcher

 

what’s a statue of Thatcher made to incarnate but stasis? (as in

status quo) this iron lady, upgraded to bronze, stands for closure:

closed shops, closed pits, closed minds with a d, closed books,

closed doors for the grocery world she came from; only trapdoors

flew open. her grey aureole brainwashed voters to reject the red,

setting them to play on boards of snakes and ladders, ascending

one or two rungs then slithering into a fiscal abysm, exchanging

mass-Marxist struggle for a mass-Murdochian cop-out. Rupert

shares her pedestal (whose rhino hide would snap any chisel).

when there are so few carved, curved forms of historic females

it seems a shame that from her stone paps the only milk on offer

is militancy and mediocrity. oh goddess of the monetarists

who on her unjust scales weighed up every grain of Bobby Sands,

inside a larger-than-life coiffure the grey matter calculates on

at the Members’ Lobby, levying Elysium’s posthumous taxes

                                                *

a decade in Pluto is more than ten years

where her shade thunders, cool as ice ages

 

 

 Niall McDevitt is the author of three collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He read at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown in 2012, and has performed in Iraq at the Babylon Festival.  He blogs at poetopography.wordpress.com

 

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