The Museum of London

This city is built on clay and silt
Beside a wide and winding river -
this is the skull of an auroch
 the ancient hulking ox with flaring horns
Wider than a taxi cab
A small bath tub - beside it is a human cranium
almost like a hazelnut . Litter and remains
Of a Roman city burned to ash by Boudica
Here is typhoid , plague and cholera
detected in a water pump
By Dr Snow -- discoverer
That epidemic is not spread
by leaves or rotting cabbages
Mysterious gases , Bad Night Air ,
but by leakings from unburied dead
into drinking water
and bacteria
If there’s one theme in this museum - it’s disease and drains
These sewers engineered with Vision -
almost unimaginable in these make-do days
- of water gushing through the ground
Freely swishing human waste through tunnels
Far wider than they ever thought
There’d be a need
And they were not expecting this - or were they ?
For this is where the fatberg’s lurking
A bad dream growing underground
Longer than three buses - found
pulsating in its ancient lair
And festering its germs - warfare
in  flesh of nappies , fat and hair
And wetwipes - like a giant toad
In toxic whiteness down there glowing
In the tunnels - nightmare - growing
Did they suspect this future creature
Infection’s noxious new recruit
Leviathan of putrid suet
This struggle underneath  the road
Down in the fatberg’s dank abode
To keep the sewers clear and flowing
And built the tunnels wider , deeper ?
In the museum
We see the Lord Mayor’s coach and pearly kings
And churches - big and small - and railway stations
And suffragettes and demonstrations
Return of salmon , harbour seals ,
And pie and mash and jellied eels
But mostly it’s disease and drains


December 2018