The beautiful stones

heritage is where you find it
and though the history's shaky
reading the past through
the beautiful statues is a growth
industry, the stories rising up
as the stones are pulled

down with all history is younger
than you think, the silent
stones an ersatz recreation, as
men decided what the books should
have been, so now we talk
of heritage, as though that explained

all the lines of marble and the
subscripted inscriptions the
simple truths simpler fifty
years past the event the stones
meaning more than they ever

imagine at night teams of  guerilla
sculptors raising statues to
their versions, frantic chiselling
in the scented dark the
cat and mouse with the desecrators

statues spring up as others collapse
letters inscribed then spray-painted
over and the instant is always in flux
(as is the past
but nobody's told them)