The Unicorn
It stood, a monument to chastity and honour
A memory of hope entombed in stone.
Grey and old, defaced by birds and man and time it stood,
A throwback to a different age,
Around which school children ate their lunches and
Drunks belched away their afternoons and
No one ever looked to see the thing that shaded them.
Days came and went; then months, then years;
And still no one looked, no one wept to witness the humbling of their unicorn.
Just a place to steal a kiss, or more; on a dark summers night.
Always and forever.
Almost forgotten, but never by me.
Dance my unicorn, dance yourself into another universe on those concrete hooves.
I see you.
© Cathie Bagley
This poem came after watching a TV show about statues in Lancashire parks or some such.
I’ve always had a place in my heart for unicorns. Not the poncy, pink, spangled abominations that lurk around children nowadays, pernicious little bastards (the unicorns, not the children, although...)
No, I’m talking about unicorns built like a carthorse with a bloody big spike on its head, a mind full of old magic and stomp-on-you hooves. That kind of unicorn.
I wondered what had happened to them. Had they really all gone?
If not, where could they be hiding?
And then I thought, what if one was trapped in plain sight.
No-one really looks up at things, especially if they see them every day.
A statue in a park, who looks at them? Really?
I imagined that the statue just turned up in the park, right by the big tree. Almost like it had fallen asleep in the night and been frozen to the spot. No-one seemed to mind though, and soon enough the council had stuck it on a plinth, and put some seating round it. Now the park had a statue of a unicorn, and the unicorn had a tomb.
