{"id":78993,"date":"2016-04-22T21:30:24","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T21:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=78993"},"modified":"2016-05-03T13:55:13","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T13:55:13","slug":"hard-by-in-globe-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/hard-by-in-globe-road\/","title":{"rendered":"Hard by in Globe Road"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Gareth Evans.<\/p>\n

“This garden was laid out by friends of the school, hard by in Globe Road.”
\n– signage for Globe Road Memorial Gardens, Bethnal Green, London (opened 1926)<\/em><\/p>\n

Globe… directly from Latin, globus: also, of men, ‘a throng, crowd, body, mass’, which is related to gleba: ‘clod, lump of soil’ <\/em><\/p>\n

Road… from Old English, rad: ‘riding expedition, journey, hostile incursion’; in Middle English, ‘a riding, a journey’, sense of ‘open way for travelling between two places’; the meaning ‘narrow stretch of sheltered water’ is from early C14; Old English, radwerig: ‘weary of travelling…’<\/em><\/p>\n

Who will answer the questions that cannot quite be said?<\/p>\n

everywhere the dead<\/p>\n

the wind the wind my eyes<\/p>\n

cities under their assault, cities and the morgues of cities
\nspilling
\nout of room<\/p>\n

trampling out of rooms
\nleaves of shoes in scatter
\non the floors of halls and hospitals
\nshoulders hips and wrists and breasts on fire<\/p>\n

flame of hair in flames<\/p>\n

sight and hearing shot<\/p>\n

oh the great outnumbering of the dead<\/p>\n

assemblies of the gone
\nfilling every vacant field<\/p>\n

chanting through their cracked pale lips
\nthe solitary wish<\/p>\n

remember let the walls
\nremember
\neveryone who was<\/p>\n

the wind the wind their eyes<\/p>\n

we bury them with deaths that fall from skies
\nthey wait in the store and queue and
\nkill us from the chest
\nwe and they and we and<\/p>\n

they<\/p>\n

an ‘other’
\nis a what is
\njust
\nanother person
\nstruggling not to die<\/p>\n

and even to survive<\/p>\n

in cities
\nin the common darkness
\nin the capital of light
\nwear your coat but
\nopen
\nloose
\nhide nothing but your fear<\/p>\n

wake up and do not lie<\/p>\n

throw the risk that is
\nyour life into
\nanything that floats
\nspace for your body
\njust perhaps
\na child or two
\nnot more<\/p>\n

and leave the unsure coast<\/p>\n

burn your fingerprints
\na smear of ash across the tide
\nor offer them like eyelids
\nglued shut beneath a train
\nas you attempt
\nyour fatal entrance
\nto the city of the world
\nto the town of the globe<\/p>\n

oh the great communities of earth
\nin the arcades and the public realms
\nall the tongues and all the gestures of
\nthe hand
\nand the multifarious mouths that sing
\nand the infinite alchemies of food
\nits serving and the stranger’s table set<\/p>\n

arrive
\nbare soled
\nout of the huge voyage of your need<\/p>\n

into the woven ways
\nthe lanes of dyer’s colour
\nto the poverty of tears
\nand the blinding gale<\/p>\n

the wind the wind your eyes<\/p>\n

in the day a theven lane it was
\nhalf inch a loaf
\na bird a bush
\na scrawny plate
\nraise your last
\nthis thin unleavened hour<\/p>\n

so where to search for solace
\nlonged for
\narms inside this
\nswollen maze
\nwhen everywhere a non-place of
\nconsumption
\nof all things and energies and hours
\nin the silvered forest of the towers?<\/p>\n

will it be let
\nyour gentle soft incursion?<\/p>\n

for to reach this place
\nmeans your fierce displacing
\nof everything you were<\/p>\n

to find yourself one Sunday late
\nlate
\nin a long year
\nin a grasp of garden
\ncraft school made
\nwatched over
\nby the blinded outstretched
\nlegendary
\nhand<\/p>\n

between the
\npanes of sealed steel
\nbound tight as silence over
\nvast and ancient wounds
\n– eyeless all the trailing routes to Gaza –<\/p>\n

and the vanished station of the crossroad<\/p>\n

in this yard of mortal
\nstones
\nthe script long run to runes
\nbroken teeth of memory in the gagged soil mouth
\nof years<\/p>\n

thorny acacia
\ngolden privet
\nprunus
\nflowering cherry
\nand
\nsnowberry
\ncurrant
\nand
\nveronica<\/p>\n

all of this the growing granted gift<\/p>\n

now we scaffold the demolition
\n‘we do removal’
\nthe short assassin is still
\nalive<\/p>\n

so tear past the old frontiers of freight
\nnavigate the ghost rails
\ndodge the live wires
\nand the constant blows<\/p>\n

you are the one who lost their way
\nyou are the one who could not stay<\/p>\n

you are the one who opened doors
\nyou are the one who heard the poor<\/p>\n

you are the one who knew the call
\nyou are the one who left it all<\/p>\n

sea and land and autumn air
\nfailing fast past all repair<\/p>\n

build a chest tomb
\nto your loss
\nhis tiny 8 months old<\/p>\n

his sacred passage
\nshort as breath<\/p>\n

the wind the wind our eyes<\/p>\n

find any shelter past all shocking weather<\/p>\n

listen to the dead and listen hard<\/p>\n

\"1000x2000\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nGareth Evans<\/strong> is a writer, producer, presenter and curator. He programmes film for the Whitechapel Gallery, London.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"image<\/p>\n

Globe… directly from Latin, globus: also, of men, ‘a throng, crowd, body, mass’, which is related to gleba: ‘clod, lump of soil’ <\/p>\n

Road… from Old English, rad: ‘riding expedition, journey, hostile incursion’; in Middle English, ‘a riding, a journey’, sense of ‘open way for travelling between two places’; the meaning ‘narrow stretch of sheltered water’ is from early C14; Old English, radwerig: ‘weary of travelling…’<\/p>\n

By Gareth Evans<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78993\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}