There were monkeys everywhere; <br />all with badges gently velcroed to their coats – <br />‘Supervisor’; ‘IT operative’; ‘Catering’; <br /> <br />in the corridors, those who chattered <br />seemed to have been taught broad vowels; <br />I swear they spoke pentameters iambic. <br /> <br />Down the corridor of this carefully designed space, <br />even an in-house cinema; today, I note, it’s playing <br />the film of Borges’s ‘Libraries of Babel’ <br />and an old Marx Brothers comedy. <br /> <br />The building is light and airy, beside it <br />the river flows sedately, as if it knows <br />it waters hallowed ground; swans glide <br />as if to speak of poetry in motion. <br /> <br />opposite, the Zen garden has been thoughtfully banked <br />to accommodate that Asian requirement, <br />a hundred tourists holding above their heads <br />a hundred mobiles: sapling forest of trivial fond record; <br /> <br />calm outside, subduing the tourist hordes; <br />inside, an air of suppressed excitement; <br />it seems that after many years, <br />the team had passed the major test – <br />or as their press release phrased it so quaintly, <br />‘With proud-flying colours new apparison’d’… <br /> <br />I read on: ‘Oh brave new world, that hath such creatures in’t! <br />No longer Nature’s child, but Nature’s pen; <br />No longer aping man, but nurturing men! ’ <br /> <br />It seems that the Institute, programmed with all the data <br />that man and monkey together might accumulate, <br />were ‘sailed upon a venture new embark’d’: <br />a brand-new play by The Shakespeare Primate Trust, <br />‘honouring his great, unblotted name’…<br /><br />Michael Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/how-brave-this-new-world-shines-how-fine-its-words/
