Statues

The disappeared, the totalled, those who ain’t there;
whether hollow, solid, reinforced, bolted
or cemented to a pedestal,
nothing is as invisible as a monument,
until you turn the spotlight on it;
as ghostbusters prepare to topple another statue.

The past may be best understood
as the bust on a tottering plinth
of a complete unknown being wheeled away;
a once majestic face on currency and buildings
torn down and cast into the oubliette
of a long time ago.

Let them who are without sin
take up the correction chisel,
to hammer, smash, throw down in a puddle
of blood, sweat and tears, the unwanted;
surplus to requirements of the present;
to cast out the decapitated, sink them at sea.

There are multitudes in the cancelled lines,
depedestalled saviours awaiting de-installation,
deconstruction, decolonisation, defenestration.
They raise a monument to replace a monument.
Statues of different sizes await comeuppance.
Each bust gone bust and busted down to size.

Those once approved of are now torn out
of book pages; disambiguated, declassified
deselected, renumbered, and deported;
certain to have gone for a burton; at one
with the thrown shoe, the thrown stick,
the thrown bomb, the torn-off limb,
the over-thrown world we live in.

David Eggleton

David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021, and Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024. His poetry chapbooks include Mundungus Samizdat (2024), and his most recent poetry collection Lifting the Island was published by Red Hen Press in Pasadena, California in September 2025.