Pantheons: Sculpture at St Paul's Cathedral (c.1796-1916)

50 Monuments in 50 Voices – Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons – Tice Cin

‘Resin Tears’: Poet Tice Cin’s Response to the Monument to Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons (1819–1855) by Matthew Noble (1855)

Tice Cin headshot
Tice Cin. Photo © Eric Aydin-Barberini
Monument to Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons (1819–1855) by Matthew Noble (1855)
'Resin Tears' by Tice Cin (50 Monuments in 50 Voices)

Resin Tears

– in response to a relief of a sea wall:
Monument to Captain Edmund Mowbray Lyons.

Üsküdar’a Gider İken
We cross between Asia and Europe
A boundary where fault lines wince
Bury losses in Haydarpaşa
A cemetery of hinterlands

Pick up books on Valiant Sailors
Those men wreathed in flags
Cover them with Ay Yıldız
Moons and stars
An eagle to call their wing

Coastal defences in a flat tongue
A burnished hook, brush born
Every manly attribute, as if an endearing quality
Time cooked in the Black Sea
Sovereign says, ‘what an ornament’

This life bejeweled, we wonder who will sees us
Somewhere in the prime of his life, officers and ship knew him
Two sailors on deck with memory
Spoke of earthly honour, gossoon daydreams
He lived, before dying as a hero and a Christian should die.

We don’t know smoke
We only imagine it
A Crimean mountain background to a mastic tree
Tears of Sakız
Foliage contested

Besides a crew paid monument, two women embrace
Leant forward as only tethers touch
Less ermine than cloaked by queens
Only febrile in the sense of derivatives
These mouths of choices, these wonderings

About Tice Cin

Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist from North London. A recipient of a London Writers Award for Literary Fiction, Cin’s debut novel Keeping the House has just been published; a story set in Tottenham that explores glitched modernity and isolation, and heavily features cabbages.

She has been published by places such as Skin Deep and Extra Teeth, and commissioned by venues including Battersea Arts Centre and Edinburgh International Book Festival. She creates digital art as part of Design Yourself – a collective based at the Barbican Centre – exploring what it means to be human when technology is changing everything. A producer and DJ, she also hosts a regular radio show Homing Tunes w/ Tice.

Find Tice Cin on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

About the Monument

Unveiled in 1856, Matthew Noble’s mid-Victorian, white-marble relief monument commemorates Crimean veteran and royal naval officer Captain Edmund Moubray Lyons (October 27 1819- June 23 1855). Lyons served in the First Opium War against China, in the Mediterranean, and the East Indies, before joining allied British, French, and Ottoman Turkish forces in the Crimea, fighting the Russians, where he lost his life.