HOGSBACK

These pictures were taken on the Hogsback Tour Iwent on recently

Decolonization

Among   red-brick ruins

Walking on the mountain, we  start to follow

a narrow path between  the  bushes

A ragged vagrant comes towards us  from behind a rock,

holds out a hopeful  hand

“I used to stay here,” he says. ”My friends and I .

Once there was a zoo here on this mountain slope

A zoo and a University.

Girls in short skirts, bright tops and scarves, boys in Tshirts and jeans

 would walk between the cages of jackals, porcupines and monkeys

A lonely mangy lion lived here  behind a  fenc e of stakes

A hollow block of stained  cement  made him a sort of-den

He sometimes used to give out strangled roars

to scare us  students  working late at night

This  space here was  the wildebeest and zebra paddock and

this tangled ivy  covered  stone  of lecture halls

Those rusted iron boilers and that broken chimney –pipe

are all that’s left of what used, long ago,  to be  

the  faculty of engineering .

We always sat here on these steps. reading and chatting

We sat here between classes.  and after seminars

Then later we all just sat here

Waiting, waiting,

It was the lion that left first and then the zebras and the monkeys.

I saw my friends off at the airport.

 others caught the Greyhound.

I was left behind.

PROTEST

They are so young, so brave, so beautiful

Facing shields and bullets with their stones

and their buckets of poo.

shouting  incomprehensible,t courageous words

as they break barriers ,beat  down towers,

force   gates to open up for  every  -one. l.

But when they get inside the walls they’ll  find

the halls of learning have dissolved,  

They’ve turned to mist and floated off into the cloud.

While the pale conquerors they so despise

have been invaded in their turn, been colonised

by dark hordes from the Middle East and Africa