Tuesday

"And Some There Be"
On the road to Cap del Pinar
a plaque reads: "Victorious engineers 1939",
to those who
dug, blasted, pinned, tarmacked,
built this precipitous way.
And I thought
how often do we commemorate
the men and women who
quietly, gloriously,
create, not destroy.
The triumphant cleaner,
the undefeated carer,
the conquering call centre clerk,
the broadbacked brickie?

And lest we forget
there's a carved stone
in a plaza in Paris
which honours those
society brands as failures
for whom poverty is
the only prize.

I wonder whether
in amongst the celebrity, the influential and the hero,
there's room for the mediocre,
for the does their best,
for the not quite good enough?

Where indeed stands
the marble memorial
to the ordinary,

to the majority of us?