When it finally passed

there was no announcement

on the six o clock news.  The flags

continued to flap languidly

at the end of their poles. A notice

went up outside a gallery:

today Working Class Art died.

It had been ailing for years; had

been fed an unhealthy diet due

to rising food prices and

had been breathing dirty air.

During the pandemic while

some art grew fat and robust,

while ballet dancers practiced

in kitchens and the nation

baked bread, working

class art was fighting

to survive in a small flat,

working two jobs and

caring for its elderly mum.

But it had survived, until now.

A crowd began to gather

outside the gallery at four

o clock.  They didn’t bring

flowers or balloons or cards.

They didn’t light candles

or hold hands.  Instead they

brought poems, scribbled

on receipts and the backs

of letters – poems which

showed the light which

squeezed through the cracks

of a difficult life.  Poems which

said yes, but this is what we

can do.  They brought

paintings of streets

and shops and flats and

people, of bent backs and

hidden scars.  They

brought music, played on

second hand instruments

and stories about ordinary

lives.  They brought all of

these things, the intention

to remember and celebrate.

The intention to show that

even though, on that day,

working class art had finally

succumbed to a protracted

illness, nobody could claim

that it had never existed at all.