Tom Coverdale: ‘Warsaw’
Warsaw
Socialist realist housing blocks a dozen levels high,
stuccoed to collect the pollution, butt-ugly by design
—as if making the dwellings equally ugly
would make their dwellers more equal—
face off like the bars of ten thousand equals signs.
In the colour-hungry post-war dusk
every blind in the Bloc was drawn,
in any kind of weather,
lest someone working with them
spy someone looking too happy or sad.
But a few summers after the Curtain fell
the occasional shirtless worker,
absorbed by the fifty missing years
on his timber-laminate TV,
would leave the blind up, needing the breeze
to cool eyeballs hot as Lenin’s
on the platform at Finland Station.
Later, even in winter,
when the sky is wet newspaper
till dark at sixteen hundred,
Warszawiaks would zigzag
up the concrete flights
and leave the curtains open
after sloughing their coat cocoons.
Tonight a couple hang framed on night
with faces over a cookbook—
maybe some recipe of non-white provenance.
A student learns…
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