When the square empties and the guards go to smoke,
I clear my bronze throat and speak to the pigeons.
They are my only honest citizens.
They sit on my head and tell me exactly what they think.
I was cast in a hurry, you know.
The sculptor was told: make him taller than the clock tower,
make his hand point toward the future.
Nobody said where the future was,
so my finger points at a bakery.
Every morning children are marched past me
in neat lines with paper flags.
They are told I am watching over them.
I am. I watch them yawn. I watch them grow up
and stop looking up.
I have seen four parades and three riots from here.
I saw the young man who painted a moustache on me
and the old woman who scrubbed it off
and then, when no one was looking, kissed my bronze shoe.
I still don’t know which of them loved me.
I know what happens to statues.
I have heard the cranes in other cities,
the cheering, the long slow fall.
Some nights I practise falling in my mind
so it will not hurt as much.
But until then, I stand.
I point at the bakery. The pigeons judge me.
And the city goes on living around my feet,
as if I were weather,
as if I were only a very tall mistake
that nobody yet has the ladder to correct.
