They often ask if I miss you
subsisting now in the hush of a country lane.
No, I say, not that magnificent metropolis
which sprawls like a soft, ripe cheese
concrete ever-crusting over London clay.
Those pavements packed with footsteps
fast food, fracas, and harried faces
hurrying, every hurrying to a happening, elsewhere.
Entertainment, events, club, café and restaurant
city of consumption; consuming itself piece-meal
to trade the prostrate past for futures in the sky.
A honey-pot for visitor and youth, energized
and charging up on street lamps, traffic lights
store front sparkle, the spicy life of the night
My London is another sort of place;
weekend city streets when commuters
are dozing in their dormitory towns
and the tour bus rarely comes
The medieval rubbing shoulders with modernity
unshakable, unshockable,
Churches, guilds, the antiquarian
standing their ground, as they've stood for centuries
dripping rich with tales and histories
of Kings and Romans, fire and plague
ships in docks, palaces, rookeries 1 and prison.
And always the Thames, an old brown river god
our constant companion, meandering miles
to the quiet shires or ebbing to the wide-mouthed sea
where my long-gone London-born love
left his ashes on an outbound wave.
- Rookeries – congested slums of the 18th century onwards
For her poetics prompt “City Love” Punam invites us to write a poem of a city we live(d) in and/or love(d)
PoetryPix 