Poems on the Underground

"When Poems on the Underground was launched in 1986, we hoped that London's two million commuters would be charmed to discover poems by Shelley and Burns, Seamus Heaney and Grace Nichols enlivening their daily Tube journeys. We little guessed that our dream of scattering poetry about in public places would be adopted by mass transport systems in New York, Paris, Dublin, Stuttgart, Barcelona, Athens, Shanghai, Moscow and St. Petersburg, in capital cities in Scandinavia and Australia, and in scores of smaller cities in the UK and abroad. London's Poems on the Underground are now assumed to be part of the urban landscape, a model for primary school projects and a subject for Ph.D. theses in media studies and semiology..."
Introdução da Nona Edição do Livro Poems on the Underground

O Quid, já que o Metropolitano de Lisboa não o faz, também vai copiar a ideia descaradamente e, indo ainda mais longe no plágio, publicar aqui alguns dos cartazes do Poems on the Underground lidos como quem não quer a coisa entre duas estações. Nada melhor para começar a série do que este

Poem on the Underground

Proud readers
Hide behind tall newspapers.

The young are all arms and legs
Knackered by youth.

Tourists sit bolt upright
Trusting in nothing.

Only the drunk and the crazy
Aspire to converse.

Only the poet
Peruses his poem among the adverts.

Only the elderly person
Observes the request that the seat be offered
to and elderly person.

D.J Enright