Tag: London

Unbent

(in honour of Eavan Boland)

It was a London summer. It was dry.
Half of June was full of Downing Street,
the Tower of London,
Hampstead Heath,
Stoke Newington,
Speaker’s Corner,
the Abbey,
the City.

The other half was Chiswick,
ticket machines,
waybills,
route maps,
accident reports,
“Fares please.”
I worked on a bus.
It had a number.
There were stairs to climb,
passes to inspect,
cash to collect.

There was a woman. She got on in Camden Town.
She carried shopping. She knew where she was going.
She never spoke to me.
As I walked along the lower deck, issuing tickets,
she showed her travel pass.
I nodded and moved on.
She got off at Swiss Cottage.
I was sure she went on to Golders Green on the 28 bus.

She kept to herself. I wanted to follow her
back through what it had been like during the war
before she escaped Germany.
I wanted to know what happened to her family,
and if she lived alone in London.
I walked from Chalk Farm after work

past Primrose Hill to the bus stop where she got off.
I saw her going into a flower shop on a Friday afternoon.
I was curious. Did she buy them for herself, or for the cemetery?
By August, whenever my bus skirted Trafalgar Square
and drove down Whitehall, past Downing Street, around Parliament Square,
I imagined the bombing,
the woman who commanded the bus,
the woman who conducted the number 24.

The quiet woman recovering in Golders Green,
I asked myself whether she’d got a job
at the Ministry after D-Day.
Whatever she spoke of during the Blitz,
I wanted to know where her country was in those days
and where it was that long dry summer.

The Tower,
the Heath,
Hyde Park,
The Abbey,
Threadneedle Street
faded.
I went into and beyond the city,
put on the uniform and badge number 115364,
walked to the garage, signed in, sat in the canteen.
NBA, no bus available, hoping I’d be sent home early.

I went down the stairs into the output,
handed in my box, spare ticket rolls,
cash bags, the machine, and the key to the locker
on the Routemaster where I kept my things.
I walked to Camden Town hoping to see her again
with the face of an unbent survivor.

The city of London 

The City of London 

Cocktail-shaker for the World
Bridge-builder, fortune-maker
City of greetings, grime and grit
City of tongues
City of preachers, teachers and elephants
City of wars
City of screams and exhibitionists
City of Empire
City of fires, plague and drawing rooms
City of parks, love-makers, trouble-makers, heart-breakers, imperial, ethereal, thirst-slakers, pace-makers, peace-wakers
City of dogs, cats, rats, scavengers and paintbrushes
City of players, symphonic stayers, hyperbolic cares
City of ruins
City of wounds, marches and prayers
City of bubbles, stock-takers
City of pain, disdain, refrain
City of shoes, falafel, matzoh ball soup, chopped liver, peppercorns, cardamom, chillies and curls
City of deaths, debts, resurrections, assumptions
City of refugees
City of the poor
City of the sword
City of slaves, waves, graves, sails
Race-gobblers
City of the clock
City of time and charts
City of natural history, kings, queens, nobility, futility
City of the blitz and bliss and bits
City of the Underground and flight
City of hiding places, stones, Sherlock Holmes
City of reinventions
City of anonymous burdens
Melody-makers, sacrifices
City of the heat and the Crystal Palace
Harbinger of malice
Brain of the Serpentine
City of masons, Livingstone, Gladstone, earthworms, sculptures, sepulchres, sceptics
City of songs and eavesdroppers, towers, bowers, superpowers and sour grapes
City of the chrysalis
Storyteller, seducer of words, fountain pens, notebooks, fish and chips, pie and mash.

City of fountains and ships
City of truth, city of factions, city of the Heath, city of smog, city of the Frost Fair
River banker, clangors, Doppelgangers,
City of joy
City of birth, mirth, thirst,
the witty first city
pitiful playground
foundation of the nation
creation and gestation
pregnant
City of the parties
City of the Open Mind
Martinis
Broad cocktail-shaker for the World.

————–

(Inspired by Carl Sandburg’s poem about Chicago)

 

Reunited

I left the house of my reincarnation
before the swallows returned
the year they cancelled the Grand National.

I walked out the door
before dawn disappeared, drove through a dream
as if in a dismal draft of corked Dolcetto.

I pitched my leaky tent in Wiltshire
’til forced out by a wife’s thirst
for regeneration.

Winter hardened the road I travelled
as I wished to wallow like a pig
in the hot mud Bladud found.

I sailed back to the Province of my birth
in a ferry beset by bleeding ballast,
into the storm of a tiger’s saliva

whipped by Irish bankers, Roman bishops,
windy politicians and uncivil servants.
The rant of ravaged youths, refugees from famine,
coursed through my bloodstream, out my throat
and stained my pen.

I wrote resurrection out of my will.

until I flew to the city of surprised eyes,
composer’s minds,
mouthful feasts

until I sat opposite my child in Southark
speaking of the Golan, green with cotton,
forgetting Masada and the Dead Sea

and lived to swim again
among dreadlocks, hijabs, sidecurls, pale people
and more

until at last I greet myself
arriving at my own house
in my own skin

and we smile again
reunited over broken bread
and the words of one imagination.