For Martin Luther King: A poem about a statue and a new form of social justice. “Monument,” by poet Joan Michelson
Monument
by Joan Michaelson
Days after George Floyd was kneed to death
and demos spread at speed like a contagion,
in Bristol, England, a statue of a slave trader
was wrested from its plinth and rolled into the river.
A black woman leaped up to take the slave trader’s place.
She was a commanding presence in black power dress
and stance: short skirt, short jacket, cocked black beret,
her right arm raised and fisted, hair worn Afro.
The image went viral. In no time she was immortalized
by the artist Marc Quinn with a resin likeness
that, unlicensed, his team erected on the adorned
Victorian stone. The statue stood a day before
the Council sent a cherry picker to carry it away.
With care, she was roped, hoisted and lowered into
the centre of the truck. A black woman,
in a moment carved in time, she’d risked herself.
Recreated, she stood bolt upright, her fist
tight beneath the blaze of orange steel.
Originally published at https://www.theintima.org.
