I counted them - the flags -

On the coach ride home from To Kill a Mockingbird.

58 pairs of them, red and white, limp and

strung up high over the motorways,

stickers reading ‘raise the colours’

like a war-cry.

Onstage, I guess, it feels different.

An artistic choice, black-white souls

in knowing conspiracy, rendering the past in emotional HD.

Ms Gill sat beside me, head bobbing,

I told her about D&D, plans for university,

how the last time I saw a stage play with school it had been My Beautiful Laundrette.

Neither one acknowledged it: the country asserting itself from on high like a God,

a Palestinian saint with the cross hung upside down,

a Union Jack with no ship to set sail through .

We slid through Birmingham,

And a woman in a burka waved at me,

her abaya flapping like a flag in the wind,

like freedom, the colour of night and stars,

the shifting wings of blackbird, nightingale and eagle.