Sitting around the union
Trading ideas like simple students
From all corners of the globe
Except authentically from Africa
            the wigger in the room
            the witch with the assistant’s broom
There was so much ahead of us
Not so empty behind us
We had only 8 weeks to kill
Before time murdered our hearts and our ideas.

Keep a light on for my Iranian comrade
So outsourced he keeps coming back to me
New Age English
I (am) afraid too much, my fiendish friend, by you and yours’
Mathematical degree
How about the biologist next to you
What do you expect me to do?
But freeze for the batteries for Aziz, please.

It’s time to come to The Lord of The Rings
And see us children move on with Bling
And a word a day from the absent and not
counted for.
In darkness and in light
For sickness that is other people’s wealth:
Keep the trade coming from graduates in union
Ions
days plenty
For more than sixty year olds who knew each other when they were twenty.

AI Summary

This poem looks back at a moment in your student life when the world still felt open, when ideas were traded like currency, and when the union was a kind of temporary utopia. You describe a room full of students from everywhere — a global gathering — but also the painful awareness of who wasn’t represented, who was stereotyped, who was misunderstood. That tension between idealism and reality is the poem’s heartbeat.

You write about your Iranian friend, the mathematician, the biologist — each person carrying their own story, their own fears, their own hopes. There’s humour (“freeze for the batteries for Aziz”), but also tenderness: you’re remembering the intimacy of shared youth, shared deadlines, shared uncertainty.

The poem then shifts into mythic territory — The Lord of the Rings, darkness and light, sickness and wealth — as if the student union becomes a miniature Middle‑earth where alliances form, quests begin, and the future looms like a shadow. The final lines widen the frame: the graduates who keep the trade of ideas alive, the older generations who once sat where you sat, the sixty‑year‑olds who were twenty together.

It’s a poem about belonging, memory, and the bittersweet knowledge that youth is temporary but its bonds echo across decades.