The Red Helicopter
(Tottenham)

Some of us are pushing the swings
in the park, a powerful pendulum,
some are hurrying for their daily bread,
counting the pennies in their pockets,
and all are treading on rustling leaves,
fallen too soon, too soon this year,
for the world is brittle with heat
and creaking and breaking apart.

The rain has come and gone
but the clouds have stayed:
No rainbow today
over the weathered church.
The blue emerges, the brightness
of grass, of the thousand things,
and the old oak stands smiling.
Higher the swings go and higher –

Then the sky bursts
with the lion’s roar
of the helicopter, closer, close,
here, the colour of blood.
And we look at each other
and fear the worst and
know it has happened
again.

A street between brick walls,
a random courtyard
or a random corner
has been stained,
and from the earth cries
someone’s blood,
someone’s brother’s blood,
our brother’s blood.

Christina Egan ©2023

I have seen the red helicopter of the emergency services land in parks in Tottenham (Lordship Recreation Ground and Bruce Castle Park). In both cases it was the middle of the day, and in both cases, a teenager had been stabbed, once fatally and once nearly so. Another young man was shot and left to die in Tottenham Cemetery. All these green spaces are vast and idyllic.

See Himmelblaue Uhr (Tottenham) for Bruce Castle Park as a haven of tranquillity and Gedächtnisgarten zu Tottenham for the old cemetery as a garden of peace.