Gall Face Green 2022

Thoughts from award-winning writer Romesh Gunesekera

This is the green that has seen one world end and another begin many times over many years: a kickstart show in the thirties, sunrise warplanes rebuffed at Easter, bare heads in ’56, bowed, beaten, unbent. Then, three years ago, those fused rucksacks turned it all inside out through a fault that at its core is our own. Bingeing on amnesia is a habit hard to break.

The word has spread, the crowds are here. Today flags, signs, hashtag anthems leap from screen to screen, neck to neck, head to heart, hope to despair and back. The many are one,

you sing, hands clasped, in a crisis finding the conscience that will forever define you.

In time to come, you will remember this was the day the impossible was possible, the ineffable turned #effable, and you and I saw in ourselves the blame we’d painted on each other. Late united, we wait for the sun to sink, release the green flash that promises wishes will be fulfilled — if not this night, then tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.

Three words now the big shout against the kaak, kaak, kaak of crows who’ve trashed not just this generation but the one before and the one that comes after. Will those who thickened their purses, their bellies, now creep behind the cortege, offering new inducements to fill more hidden coffers?

Will their freshly minted avatars find an older drumbeat under the jubilation?

Imagine if a misguided pair raised a child to be a king, forgetting the line that divides the gifted from the sly.

See him grow insatiable; eat not only the hand that feeds him, but the arm, the entire body. First one then the other parent, the house, the heavenly land — the whole lot, including, in a final act of gluttony, himself starting with the left foot, bare & burnt, then the right, moving up and in and out until there is nothing left to swallow but the tongue that in our innocence we had thought was ours.

Could it ever be?

Tomorrow’s roll call, will tell only half the story: of buds bruised, awoken. The other half is the struggle for a cleaner future that appears now locked — but not, we pray, forever.

This is the green that has seen one world end and another begin.