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
