‘Jesus Saves’
Hounslow High Street, 1979

I am nine. My mother tells me to look the other way as we pass the pigeon man in the square, outside Brentford Nylons.

I’m distracted, pulling along my brother and dreaming about Joanna Stubbs who’d holidayed in Broadstairs, and was ushered to the front of St Luke’s Mission Church that morning.

He’s now climbed onto a box encrusted with bird droppings and I
I shouldn’t look but I do, at his weathered face and his hands which hold a small brown book. His eyes are fixed on the distance, beyond the beyond.

And when we pass a few hours later, he hasn’t shifted from his hardwood spot, he’s jousting the air with his fingers, and even though it was long after Enoch, the notes fasten in my head, that we couldn’t be saved, that every last one of us was damned.

Mona Arshi was born in Southall and still lives in West London. She used to be a lawyer for Liberty, the human rights NGO. She has previously won the Magma Poetry Prize and is currently working on her first collection of poems.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter.
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