Anemones of the People

Knuckle dragging, low-slung, dead pig-eyed,

A belch or a growl passes for thought,

Ogres, tramping through dirty snow fields

To sniff out banks of flowers in the cold:

Carnations, roses, violets, chrysanthemums,

Anemones.

Monument to a man without a needed grave

Or headstone: an activist who went for one walk

Too many.

Dying conveniently of sudden death syndrome,

Among the silver birches of a mind frozen land.

The flowers are feverishly demolished

By the men in uniform black: black

Down to their leaden souls, stuffing

Diaphanous petals into shiny plastic

Sacking: trodden on for good measure,

Never to see the sun again.

But what is this? A jackboot stamps.

There is something pushing strong under-foot,

A lone green sprout, and then a yellow flower.

Out of every thug footfall, flowers press upwards,

in perfumed beauty, exploding,

To chase the slack jawed back to their endless shadow.

In the helping snow, the flowers fuse and grow

Until,

Across the waiting city,

They bend into a dissident smile.

Pickering, Anemones of the People.pdf

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Paul Pickering

Paul Pickering is the author of seven novels, Wild About Harry, Perfect English, The Blue Gate of Babylon, Charlie Peace, The Leopard’s Wife, Over the Rainbow and Elephant. The Blue Gate of Babylon was a New York Times notable book of the year, who dubbed it ‘superior literature’. Often compared to Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Pickering was chosen as one of the top ten young British novelists by bookseller WH Smith and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize three times. Educated at the Royal Masonic Schools and the University of Leicester, he has a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University where he is a Visiting Fellow, presented his doctoral thesis to the Bulgakov Society in Moscow, recently completed a Hawthornden Fellowship Residency on Lake Como and is a member of the Folio Prize Academy. The novelist J.G. Ballard said Pickering’s work is ‘truly subversive’. As well as short stories and poetry, he has written plays, film scripts and columns for The Times and Sunday Times. He lives in London and the Pyrenees. A major theme of his novel Elephant, published by Salt in 2021, is innocence. His new blackly comic, absurdly realist novel Lucy, about obedience and rebellion, political and sexual, is published on July 15 by Salt. He is working on a new novel, CONVERSATION WITH A LION, about how things fit together and fly apart. The novel tries to explain the impossible absurdity of living, impossible like a conversation with a lion.