Poem of the week: Chrissy Williams – ‘The Burning of Houses’

If there was a prize for poem titles, Chrissy Williams’ collection Flying Into the Bear (HappenStance, £4) would surely win it.

It boasts poems with titles like “On Getting Boney M’s Cover of Mary’s Boy Child by Harry Belafonte Stuck in my Head” and “Robot Unicorn Attack”. Don’t let the references to pop culture fool you; there is nothing zany or twee about her work, as “The Burning of the Houses”, about the London riots of 2011, reveals.

Tottenham is on fire and I work in an arts centre

where the sky is blue and I can hear birdsong

from a sound installation of birds

cooing outside my office window.

This is London. Hackney is on fire now

and Jamie is looking up from his desk.

He stops working. He tweets that that he can see

people smashing up a bus. He says there is a car

being soaked in petrol. He asks if there is someone

in that car. He tells us that car has been set alight.

This is London. Croydon is on fire now

and Anna is Facebooking furiously from Manchester

calling everyone bastards for doing this .

I am watching the BBC and reading Twitter

flicking between #LondonRiot and my friends.

Sometimes you can be proud of your friends.

I remember when Bianca came to stay

and we got tickets to watch ‘The Night

James Brown Saved Boston’ in the QEH.

People are getting hurt. Television isn’t going

to save us. But it’s okay now, some of my friends

are linking to videos of kittens which must mean

everyone is fine. This is London. It is on fire.

I go to bed while it is burning. I wake up

and parts of it are still burning.

You can borrow Flying Into the Bear by Chrissy Williams from the Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton’s Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT. Tel: [phone], e-mail [email protected] or see www.spl.org.uk for details.