Library

A shock-haired youth’s ostentatious cough
divides the silence in the towering dome.
Beside him a thick mane and extravagant beard
stir, sharp eyes glare briefly at the boy
and turn back, to bury themselves again –
a feeding lion, disturbed by a mouse,
returns to the carcase, the books he devours
with such hunger. The urchin is hungry too,
and cold: this grand wheel of a room
with its spokes of desks offers a refuge
from the harsh London streets, so foreign, so drab,
full of old hats, tight collars and horse-drawn cabs,
of smugness and smog – purgatorial airs
held at bay by these massive, shelved tiers.

The boy’s brows mantle a banked fire,
an intensity quick in judgement observes
his neighbour amassing notes, poring through
fat volumes that spill into the space
the boy expects. He sees names,
Ricardo, Adam Smith, their corpulent words
muscled out by the slim volume of Heine
the boy holds. He coughs again –
is he unwell? The maned head turns, and mutters
in a guttural undertone – a foreigner too, then –
but this comfortable bourgeois, what can he know
of privation and struggle, the dark days of the soul?
The boy, on the other hand, despite his youth,
has known hell, has a season’s journal as proof.

In the man beside him the youth doesn’t know
the spectre haunting Europe, doesn’t see
another sapper tunnelling the walls
to blow open paths for others to trace.
How would he know, this lad ‘whose race
never rose but to pillage’, what each might become?
A working class hero? Yes, both, even that,
with their feet of clay: old drunkard, wife beater,
and the future gun runner, slave trade abetter.
They sit, glowering with mutual incomprehension;
the grey grumbling light of this great institution
brings them together in apparent contradiction.
Generations on, that dialectic resolves
over millions of pages on thousands of shelves.

Oct 15