No forests of the night for us.
By dusk we are hunkered in our stalls,
fur against stone, listening to London.

Above the hum, the more jitter-eared can sift
the city’s prisoners: feathered from unfeathered,
pink-skinned from piebald. Lovebirds coloratura
to cover bass-note moans from inner cages.
Only the polar bear finds peace as he paddles
nightly up the Thames looking for pike,
but even he returns each dawn, drawn back
to the sanctuary of bolt and key.

Our keepers are rookies, each meal they prepare
an experiment in toxic: stale crusts, sewer rats,
last week’s mutton from the Prospect of Whitby.
The ostriches have the worst of it, dining each day
on rusty nails, though they survive even this,
bury their heads while others roll. The elephants too,
sogged in burgundy, lurch three sheets to the wind,
allowing themselves (ever) to forget.

By day there are visitors: amateur bestiarists
doing the jail-trail from Bedlam to Thameside,
queens and virgins, loose-headed rebels,
poets with notebooks who gawp at the tiger and versify
the landscapes our mothers gave up teaching us.
For them we ambulate through the expected motions,
mumble a none-too-convincing growl if so inclined.
Sometimes we mean it; mostly it ripples the tedium.

At least we know ourselves for what we are.
We are caged, but we have had no hand in it.
We are caged, but not ourselves a cage.



[Note: A menagerie existed at the Tower of London from the early 13th Century right up until 1835, when the Duke of Wellington finally gave it the boot. Over the course of its existence, inmates included lions, leopards, tigers, elephants and a Norwegian polar bear.]