November 2000
Liam's
Poems from London
The Harrow Road
The Harrow Road
And old people tell me it used to be so grand
With Marks and Spencers and swanky stores
And now the banks are drifting off
Not certain we have enough to fill their pleading coffers
It went through a doubtful phase
With crumbling buildings
Becoming the home of colonies of peering pigeons
And odd ferns grasping for a hold
In the shattered masonry
Little businesses struggled along the pavements
Selling everything from plastic buckets
To Irish sausages often for under a pound
And the mix of many races meshed over the cracked slabs
Struggling to bring home the food for life
They say the council is pouring millions in
To upgrade and revamp and invigorate
And sure there is the occasional church building
Which attempts to draw us in and try to understand
Our disintegration
There is the half penny bridge
All bright and blue with glittering colours
Where passer-bys and hoboes and winos
Cast empty morsels to the darting coots
And Canadian geese glide past indifferent to our plight
They've started beside the bridge
A community café that offers delicious food
At a price beyond our reach
And offers a platform overlooking the canal
To view the shadows forming in our mind
But there is hope with the Number 18 bus passing by
To whisk us away to the mysteries of the inner city
Where all is entertainment and glamour
And movement and light and the statistics of Queens Park
And the Mozart Estate are millennium miles away
The Irish pubs on a Saturday night refuse to let go
The visions of home
And as the balladeer chants his mantras
The froth of the Guinness wells up
And descends into the darkened glass
Liam Purcell (Born 1940)
Poem of the Month
from Afterlives
I am going home by sea
For the first time in years.
Somebody thumbs a guitar
On the dark deck, while a gull
Dreams at the masthead,
The moon-splashed waves exult.
At dawn the ship trembles, turns
In a wide arc to the back
Shuddering up the grey lough
Past lightship and buoy,
Slipway and dry dock
Where a naked bulb burns;
And I step ashore in a fine rain
To a city so changed
By five years of war
I scarcely recognise
The places I grew up in,
The faces that try to explain.
But the hills are still the same
Grey-blue above Belfast.
Perhaps if I had stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.
Derek Mahon (Born 1941) |
All texts are ©2000
Letters from London 