VENUS IN CONCRETE

No matter how many times you walk the same route there is always something new to note along the way. If there isn’t then you aren’t looking properly.

Today as I walked up the alley, past the bottom end of Sindelfingen Park, by the graffitied scout hut and on towards the Pentland Road shopping arcade I saw a bollard for the first time. Well I must have seen it many times as I’ve walked this way from Mum and Dad’s bungalow to the shops for years but I’ve never actually registered it.

Today it hits me deep in the soul. It’s a standing stone, a megalith, a petrified goddess, a diagram in Mr Jones’ sex education class text book.

The short mown grass around it bows to it. Dogs lift their legs against it. Smallish children on their way home from school leapfrog it.

Until today I was blind to it. Maybe it wasn’t there right up until the moment I looked at it. In actuality I don’t doubt that it was in physical existence but now it has power in its many beings.

The vertical crack down a short part of it says to me “female”. I’m sensing Aphrodite. Venus in concrete.

street furniture
don’t crush my spirit
with pains and torment

Paul Conneally