After the Broadcast
After the broadcast floats from the wireless,
the back door open (just to let a breeze in),
to where they hold the faculty parties–
after the broadcast goes unheard, with no
civil ears to listen, to debate, to mark
the essays and come to a smiling impasse–
after the police came, concerned, but purely
in a provisional sense, for a student
(or rather a person of interest), in connection
with these disquieting leaflets that crossed
their desk, which could, as the follies of bright,
engaged young people are known to do,
mean so much thrown away–after
the student in question was then detained,
and this is all there is to be said of it,
you understand–after the champagne,
and the canapés, and the red velvet cake
for the new head of 18th-Century Studies–
after the lack of sleep, some phone inquiries,
a wall of silence, the bombs that broke it,
the rallies, the riots, the children sent away,
the crackdown, the uneasy months pregnant
with the rough beast, the children home
and away again, and now, as now it happens–
after the broadcast, and the jazz standards
on the gramophone, and the fashionable
still-lives bought to hang on their walls–
they write invitations to a faculty party.
After the broadcast floats from the wireless,
the back door open (just to let a breeze in),
to where they hold the faculty parties–
after the broadcast goes unheard, with no
civil ears to listen, to debate, to mark
the essays and come to a smiling impasse–
after the police came, concerned, but purely
in a provisional sense, for a student
(or rather a person of interest), in connection
with these disquieting leaflets that crossed
their desk, which could, as the follies of bright,
engaged young people are known to do,
mean so much thrown away–after
the student in question was then detained,
and this is all there is to be said of it,
you understand–after the champagne,
and the canapés, and the red velvet cake
for the new head of 18th-Century Studies–
after the lack of sleep, some phone inquiries,
a wall of silence, the bombs that broke it,
the rallies, the riots, the children sent away,
the crackdown, the uneasy months pregnant
with the rough beast, the children home
and away again, and now, as now it happens–
after the broadcast, and the jazz standards
on the gramophone, and the fashionable
still-lives bought to hang on their walls–
they write invitations to a faculty party.