• Creative Writing •
• Original Poetry •
Poetry Week: From “Lutèce, te amo”
XIV. Strange
how they lurk, these bastions of public health: the tower
of the Temple,
the Templars turned out, the Bourbons interred,
attendant
on the block or some infernal exile; Latvia, Edinburgh,
again
the rise to power, the mob’s rising anger, the fall.
And La prison de La Force now little but a plaque, a wall
on the corner
of rue du Roi de Sicile and the rue Mahler,
where
the Princesse de Lamballe was gang-raped
and lynched
by a mob involūtum in their revolutionary fervor.
Strange too, this wall the length of the Boulevard
Arago,
a bulwark of surety, blank menace, un monument
à la santé,
its pluriform wrongdoers, a wronged Apollinaire
or
the occasional evil, a quisling, a Papon.
Ahren Warner won an Eric Gregory Award in 2010, and an Arts Foundation Award in 2012. His first collection, Confer, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
