There is an absence in the gracious grid

Of avenues and spacious squares which form

The basis of the old town; nothing to do

With the plaques that gathered to proliferate

And mark the lives of great, pre-occupied men

Once housed here while their minds were out in the fields

Of physics, engineering and the arts,

Nor with the way that departed people go

As the shades of them weather further from the mauve.

No, what’s missing here and, frankly, thank

The Lord, is something to commemorate

Our passing through, that day we lost the path

At the edge of the park because of our great distraction,

Because of the greenery turning to grains of sand,

Then vanishing into the pinched waist of winter.

It stands at the verge of the square on its plinth of grass

 And is a single vertical rip in the air,

 A rough and hand-made tear which strikes the eye

 As being as shrill and modern as tomorrow,

 Yet marks the spot of the soundless English scream