by
Katy Tucker
Here on this steel bridge balcony
I wait Cross-Legged
Humbled amongst the metal Jubilee triangles
Silently un-knotting my thought tangles
Just me with my Themes
Watching the streetlights splatter
Like notes across its liquid score
We loll…
Waiting to watch,
The Evaporating,
The night escaping
Blacktime fleeting
Lighttime creeping
I like to catch the time - split
When the world goes into The Gray
The pregnancy of day
A Mesopotamia
The land between two rivers
The river Yesterday
Drip drying with the drunken hum
Of London’s party town
The river Tomorrow
Soaked in the postnatal depression
of rush hour pressure
But right now the sterling Arroyo is here
“The Grey”
A dormant Londinium
Still
Stone
Skeletal
Here I can pretend
This is a ghost town
A tracing
Right now
In this over peopled city
I am alone
In the luna tinsel of
this pale vent
Arrogant
Indulging in nothingness
I am here
to hear my heart beat
De-dum-de-dum-de-dum
My private pentameter
I like to honour
De-dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-dum
Then a bird tweet!
The feather warning
“here comes morning”
The fire extinguisher explodes
With day flame spray
Putting out The Gray
Casting red crayon scars across the sky
Dipping the Themes in aureate Tie-dye
The tan flakes glory glisten
Blushing coral -pink in corner coves
Crimson plating the snaggle toothed skyline
Amber citrus flushing in
London’s yellow, sallow a m Branding
The clouds burst into boudoir lanterns
Mimicking
The heaving Sun circle
The Great Sphere
Who is gay- golden with gloats
Rolling with ruby laugh folds
The Bulging Bully
Who shames the electric dot spots
(that click out in embarrassment)
Beam laddering holes in night’s tights
And banishing the shadows into exile
The Gray, now, seems, so, vile
The cerulean cracks
Appear
As Apollo slinks upwards
I watch this conductor
Wake up the London orchestra!
The life Master
I am nothing now
So…..
I watch….
Microscoped
In my smallness
I find Hope.
Okay, time for a long, low whistle of Wow! from me,
David. How's she doing this? Where's it coming from? I can write a little bit - retreaded academic, journalist and all that - but I can't write like this. Can't begin to. And sure, I'm a bit prejudiced, she is my daughter, after all - but that aside, the old lit crit warhorse and general word-smith in me knows - irrespective of family ties - that what she's "seen" here - and the language she's put it in - is fresh, arresting, extraordinarily vivid. And accessible.
Anyway, happiness spreads. The follow-on thought from this is this: we should have a London in Verse page on the website! Should have, will have, do have. It's started here, today, with this wonderful poem by Katy. And it'll be added to. She's going to be in good company - there are superb poems about London by everybody from Dunbar to Wordsworth to Heaney (we'll have to get permission from him of course to put his up here, but we're going to go for it). Watch this space.