For who can bear themselves forgotten?

Lock and Quay

Lock and Quay

The moon is a scuffle hunter scouring the sky

For what might be left of the sun; meantime

Light horsemen pave the way for day-plunderers

To take the game ship and steal wonders.

Mudlarks wait in sludge for lumpers to throw

Goods off the ship. Into outstretched hands of night

Shift work shifts on shifty shifting tides.

Not even Pepys knew of the gilt silt tythe

That slipped past him in black straps or Jemmy,

In shadow of admiralty and cross-silvered palms.

In this cargo of words the wards of memory quay,

The Game Lightmen and dockers, the workers

Of wave, wind and wharf,

The watermen, the tag rag and bobtail poor

Whose names long forgotten by all accounts,

Whose ghostly barges slide across celestial seas

Are now ancient mariners that carry tales

Of nature’s people in the age of sail.

To these contours of lock and quay and made ground

Open the coffer dam via the green cut.

Where watercourse was is where you are

This poem is the balance beam. Gongoozlers

Let go. Once a canal from river through earth

Now walk on the pastures of water.

Underneath footnotes the past sleeps

Footsteps like thunder ripple deep.

These words unearthed and cut by hand

Hewn from the past. This promised land.

Beneath sky and earth lock and quay

This stone holds them in memory.

The workers of now, the workers of then,

The unnamed women the unnamed men.

Look through the metropolitan sway

In the swilling light the swirling day.

Ghost boats slide past at night

Like clouds in morning sunlight.

Listening Post

Listening Post

Here are the past messages of the first born,

The last words of the front,

The first waves of spring tides,

Where night bathes the sun.

Here are the words of letters unwritten,

The tongue tied and unread,

The hymns of the uncongregated,

The unheard song unsaid.

Water, tears weightless for years,

Rise upwards from fallen eyes.

Here are the swallows returning,

The crops lifting the sky.

Here is the blood, the blood dread sun,

Climbing the edge of plight.

She holds in hands the power to stun

All darkness stilled in the night.

Slow shadows stretch and slant,

Seeds split beneath earth.

Roots of light seek the eye,

The opening irises at birth.

And here is the child born,

The harvest in bloom.

My hands hold him to light,

To dawn and the falling moon.

Light paves the way,

Night waves reveal,

The breaking new day,

Above dew-soaked fields.

We cannot be defined by war,

Not by fields sown with sorrow,

Not by the death that befell you all,

But by the peace that followed.

Look what has risen from the fallen

Above long shadows cast.

The light that shines on open minds,

The torch held in our past.

If you could hear at the listening post

One hundred years ahead,

And be, as you are, the missing host