Eight years ago in a respectable
street in Wolverhampton a house
was sold to a Negro. Now only one
white (a woman old-age pensioner)
lives there... — Enoch Powell, 1968

Where are you now,
composite white widow:
honorary virgo intacta
of a world falling apart?

One night in 1963,
your run-down street
renounced its prospect
of an English countryside,

curled a tarmac tongue
through Little Pakistan,
and with a worn decorum
skirted Piccaninny Park.

At the Casbah Club,
the neon hieroglyphs
were sharp as shards
of Royal Albert china.

The pillar-box was full:
impatient to disgorge
an evening's load
of excremental mail.

The dawn would see it all
delivered to your
segregated doorstep,
marked 'Attention racialist'.

Enough, indeed, to make
the whitest widow blanch,
or fortify the porch
and vote Conservative.

Even your chihuahua
had a seizure,
faced with such a surfeit
of exciting smells.

So what became of you?
Were you tempted by
the 'Negro speculator'
in the sequinned suit?

Did you make a dash
for whiter Walsall,
or the empire's outpost
of hygienic Solihull?

Or did you simply die —
and learn, too late,
unbiased time will
always put the boot in?