Central Europe's best English-language journal (The Irish Times)
Current issue
Archives
VOLUME XXXIX * No. 150 * Summer 1998
Home
About
Contact
Subscription
FAQ
Links

Archives

VOLUME XXXIX * No. 150 * Summer 1998

Highlights

Ken Smith
The Secret Police

They are listening in the wires,
in the walls, under the eaves
in the wings of house martins,
in the ears of old women,
in the mouths of children.

They are listening to this now.

So let's hear it for the secret police,
a much misunderstood minority.
After all, they have their rights,
their own particular ways of seeing things,
saying things, cooking things,
they too have a culture uniquely their own.

And we think

they should have their own state
where they could speak their own
incomprehensible tongues, write
their confessions, their own unknown histories,
cultivate their habits of watching
by watching each other, and fly
their own flags there, at attention
on parade in their medals at their monuments
on their secret anniversaries, making speeches,
singing praises to the God of Paranoia.

And at the end of the day
bury their dead, publish coded obituaries
to each other, and rest at last
in their own kind of peace, forever.



Ken Smith ,
is an English poet living in London. His last collection, Tender to the Queen of Spain, was published by Bloodaxe. His long poem about the 1526 Battle of Mohács appeared in HQ 144.

 
Home Current Archives Contact About Subscribe FAQ Links
 
Hosting and design by Hungary.Network Inc.