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Wordsworth’s Birthday

Missed the ten-o-one and took the five past
in the wrong direction, under the hill –
Penge East, Kent House, Beckenham Junction.

Turned-over soil in allotments crumbling,
good and grey, a deal less clay than our own.
The young cherry holds out white-bloomed arms

as earth exhales the mist from a wet March.
Ten more days and the oaks are truly green,
frayed laces of their flowers hanging.

Now there’s just the breath, the blood of April
only beneath the skin – “finer breath of
knowledge”, remembering their future.

You were the bard who called a spade a spade.
Spade!” your ode to one begins. The gardens
and gables go into the distance,

and every mile or so, the stone-built tower
or spire, that makes us far from Victoria,
launching parishes on the brick-tide.

A soft blue heaven the pale-capped pylon
points to from the site of Crystal Palace –
clean-lined, Eiffel-like, latticework spike.

Every calorie burned in the muscle
of man and horse, to inch the railway on,
channelled from the sun through a green leaf.

Under the ridge where the pleasure dome stood,
the nineteen past, Victoria non-stop.
Lucid points of may are on their way.

You look to the hills from the built-up plain
and through the iron-masters’ furnace-smoke
recall the revolution of earth.

 

John Gibbens



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