Civil War at Parliament Hill Playground
by James Greene
“Come down: you aren’t yet five!” She doesn’t stir,
astride her look-out tower still, this spy
from the maternal camp; a rampart
of hands, of hair, defends her ears.
And all those other Sunday fathers, mes
semblables, mes frères, half-axed already, slumped
beneath a slide, must mount their one-way stair,
a scaffold’s: here our executioners,
our daughters, aren’t yet up for sliding down,
unless trumpets of pardon silver the sulky air.
James Greene, born in Berlin, has translated Osip Mandelshtam (Penguin, 1991) and, Love of Beginnings, the autobiography of J.-B. Pontalis (Free Association Books, 1993); he’s also written a tragic comedy about Stalin, Killing time in the Kremlin (not yet performed). He has devised scripts for BBC Radio and worked as a gardener in a cemetery and as a psychoanalytic therapist.