Poem

The Ballad of N7

In Memory of Martin Dinnegan (1983-2007)


The Seven Sisters never go to sleep.
Every hour of every day and every night

Someone bites
Someone sips
Someone cries
Someone skips
Someone sighs
Someone puffs
Someone dances
Someone runs
Someone staggers
Someone falls
Someone smirks
Someone groans

Bodies touch
Bodies part

The familiar sound of unfamiliar tongues
Raps incessantly around the clock.
Pavements bend to the synchronic strokes of
Heavy boots
Silk slippers
Rubber flip-flops
Cork sandals
Bare feet.
Blunt stilettos stab it, now and again,
Wheels, large and small, dig invisible grooves
On the worn concrete surface,
Recording, every day, a fresh track.
Underground, sweated bodies in transit
Drum against the skeletal wafer of earth
That separates them from the others
In the upper world.

On Saturdays the tempo slows down.
The wind weaves a mellow tune through
Jamaican braids
Grey hoods
African gelees
Embroidered veils
Bouncing off the shaved heads of the Gunners’ army,
Invading the invisible asphalt cracks,
The gaps between lined-up plantains,
The yellowed pages of books stacked in a car boot
And all spaces in-between.

Life coalesces with death in this land of invisible borders
Marked by the organic smells of grilled lamb and stale booze.

This is a haunted graveyard.
Slices of Victorian times vanished
When a bomb or two fell
Through the fragile roofs of the terraced streets.
Foreign hands laid the new bricks
And filled the holes of a bruised city,
But my house still moans today
When the arthritic floorboard meets my foot.

This is the contested terrain of gangland,
Punctuated by the siren’s posthumous lament.
Words and flowers enshrine the dark spots
Where blades of angry apathy
Have mutilated children’s dreams.

This is where our ghosts live
This is where I thrive.

Monica Germana
London, UK

I was born in Sicily and moved to Scotland in 1997, where I collaborated, as a photographer, with a number of Glasgow-based theatre companies. My current writing projects include ‘Ghost Trains’, a play set in a ghostly underground system, and ‘Off-Peak’, a novella set in North London, where I live.

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