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  • Frescade
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Frescade

W. Price Turner

The statues in the square are wet and desolate
as the last bus lurches off. Arc-lamps loan
folds of stone robes a harsh sheen. Random clouds
idle past a moon honed to her keenest husk
for one who’d wet his senses on infinity,
any man’s estate. Beside the Cenotaph
a beggar squats, condemned by unanimous backs.
In streets rinsed clean of commerce a man stands
inhaling truth in a stealth of peace, while
stars mustered to his vision witness
the sundered plaques, rocked pedestals,
upheaval and topple, silence and dust.

If a boot turns a chipped head, if diligent
fingers probe and scrape, delicate tools
whittle and prise, and a restored inscription
ascertains the era, will sensitive hands
ever deduce, or the questing mind discern
the cold back erected to beggar and poet?
History, with a fresh victory embalmed,
smiles and resumes the task. Two men stretch,
as a lone taxi prowls irresolutely past
the shadow-dramatised. Stone garments glitter.
Decorum’s still-life circus rules secure.
Rampant clouds straddle the scant moon where she clings.


W. Price Turner

This poem appears in First Offence (1954), the only poem from that pamphlet to reappear in The Rudiment of an Eye the following year.

Tags:

beggars city poems existence night peace statues World War II

About this poem

A frescade is a shaded walkway.

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W. Price Turner1927 - 1998

Later in his career he wrote simply as Bill Turner, but that was long after he took the DIY approach to starting his own poetry magazine as a young man in post-war Glasgow.
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