! How Brave This New World Shines! How Fine Its Words! Poem by Michael Shepherd

There were monkeys everywhere;
all with badges gently velcroed to their coats –
‘Supervisor’; ‘IT operative’; ‘Catering’;

in the corridors, those who chattered
seemed to have been taught broad vowels;
I swear they spoke pentameters iambic.

Down the corridor of this carefully designed space,
even an in-house cinema; today, I note, it’s playing
the film of Borges’s ‘Libraries of Babel’
and an old Marx Brothers comedy.

The building is light and airy, beside it
the river flows sedately, as if it knows
it waters hallowed ground; swans glide
as if to speak of poetry in motion.

opposite, the Zen garden has been thoughtfully banked
to accommodate that Asian requirement,
a hundred tourists holding above their heads
a hundred mobiles: sapling forest of trivial fond record;

calm outside, subduing the tourist hordes;
inside, an air of suppressed excitement;
it seems that after many years,
the team had passed the major test –
or as their press release phrased it so quaintly,
‘With proud-flying colours new apparison’d’…

I read on: ‘Oh brave new world, that hath such creatures in’t!
No longer Nature’s child, but Nature’s pen;
No longer aping man, but nurturing men! ’

It seems that the Institute, programmed with all the data
that man and monkey together might accumulate,
were ‘sailed upon a venture new embark’d’:
a brand-new play by The Shakespeare Primate Trust,
‘honouring his great, unblotted name’…