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An NHS scandal: Part I
Kenneth Roy
The gesture is surrender
or supplication – hardly a threat.
You’d need imagination to be frightened
which birds, I suspect, don’t have.
Stuck in the ground, slightly tipsy,
an absurd fusty hat, the single, peg, leg.
And who respects a man in borrowed clothes?
A sense of the ridiculous prevails,
like a traffic cop on the moors.
Twitched by the wind into life,
this, once planted, seems neglected,
a sandwich man with his day of reckoning.
Crow’s Christ stands alone,
more scared than scary.
And yet, in the darkness, it looks wrong and sinister,
a midnight lollipop-man waiting for children.
Some grim part of the soul is caught in effigies,
the menace of a mask never fails.
So, I concede, terror lurks through the land
in this flapping jacket, with these outstretched arms.
Gerard Rochford lives in Aberdeen. He is the Scottish Review’s makar and contributes a poem each month. His recent publications include ‘Failing Light’ and ‘Of Love and Water’
