Remembering London
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2020
Summary
City of a zillion migrant dreams, moist,
pent up by fading wagers, conspiring how
to move and filch a dime and trade, barter
and pawn at freedom
Like then, like now, harsh shelter and refuge
of the refugee – London,
of restlessness, historic pomp and often, poise-
maze of intricate webs taunting desire
whether in damp red-brick and soot-smeared lane or
tree-lined mansion, taunting, taunting desire
always the latest, hairdo or rivet and bolt,
from ancient plants and workshops of the worldly
world, customising guns or smithing sounds
fancied ballistics from the press, desktop
or stadium, ever swarming with prols drawing pollen
from electric wires who all dream
that the calendar has stopped in an unceasing past
and moan how history has overbrimmed your banks.
Trading city of a zillion trades and megastores
cramped-up remains of empire, where forever searching
no one has seen a Londoner, save on TV, where Jolyon
Forsythe beat Phileas Fogg at whist, where no one
can trace a feeling, in the façade of careless
class and order from the warehouse to the hawkers’
market – last urban refuge of the punk and of the urban shock
whose Mohawk hair winks electric at icy winds up-down the Thames
taunting too, taunting desire – a tired image still, un-shocking
to the somnambular crowds in-outing the caverns of subway stations
Place of the harshest opiates whether in angel wings
or of the inhale-exhale from dens that defy description
cramped-up space for the stowaways stacked up in hulks
trucked in the fridges of transcontinental lorries
Destroyer of writers, shedding ink to outline your soul
Confused that everything solid is pure liquefaction and
that the river Thames is your only solid structure – and there:
at the warehouse by the warf, among the silent cranes
we hear the Banker's melancholy sigh among amassing
stacks and rows of succulent, exotic fruit.
What now Mr. Blake? Have you been gone from these
thrice-chartered streets, what do we make of woes
within these zillion migrant dreams, taunting, taunting desire?
What of the war clouds hasting across a casual sun?
What of the bombs at King's Cross or at Altergate
How many migrant dreams did they implode?
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- Around the World in Eighty DaysThe India Section, pp. 59 - 61Publisher: University of South AfricaPrint publication year: 2014