poetry | David Lumsden

Midget City
– Coney Island, Dreamland, 1904

There was before Reality TV
reality: three hundred ‘midgets’ lived
on site at Dreamland in a model town,
a replica of medieval Nuremberg
(this was before the Palace of Justice
with Crimes Against Humanity had made
the newsreels) everything exact to scale,
the picturesque charm of Old Europe plus
surf bathing, small lifeguards on tiny towers,
and the hourly false alarm which sent
the keystone fire brigade, each man a mascot,
hurtling through the narrow cobbled streets,
but as much as all this show – the vaudeville acts,
parade time at the mini garrison –
it was the bonsai living diorama
of our own poor lives portrayed that entertained,
the everyday laid out for scrutiny:
small Chinese laundrymen pegging out clothes,
plain people going about their drab routines,
domestic squabbles flaring and being dowsed,
but all subtly transformed by being on display,
the whole world turned an elaborate toy.

© David Lumsden

Overland 190–autumn 2008, p.78

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