PETER
DANIELS
Poetry
About
Events
Buy
Links
Contact
HOME
Two poems...
They're grubbing up the old modern
Any day soon
We'll be waiting for the maps to kindle
He has paid a small coin to a glass box
a dull purple ticket
which pushes on through a city of breezeblocks
The people might be
a woman in fishmonger's gloves
a man balancing two dusty old bikes
In this incarnation, his tweed suit
He maintains a sense of direction but
Somewhere at the end of this line
Mr Luczinski Takes a Tram
| Shoreditch Orchid
POETRY
| ABOUT
| LINKS
| CONTACT
| HOME
Shoreditch Orchid
rusty concrete lampposts,
with a special orange grab
on a fixture removal unit.
The planters come up behind
with new old lampposts in lamppost green,
and bury each root in a freshly-dug hole.
The bus can't get past, brooding in vibrations.
We're stuck at the half-refurbished
late-Georgian crescent of handbag wholesalers.
The window won't open. The man behind me
whistles "What a Wonderful World",
and I think to myself:
the rubble will be sifted; the streets all swept,
and we'll be aboard a millennium tram ride,
the smooth one we've been promised, with a while yet to go
until the rising sea and the exterminating meteor,
but close before the war
starting with the robocar disaster.
And when the millennium crumbles,
I'll be squinting through the corrugated fence
at the wreck of the mayor's armoured vehicle, upside down
where they dumped the files of the Inner City Partnership;
and as I kick an old kerbstone
I'll find you, Shoreditch orchid, true and shy,
rooting in the meadow streets
through old cable, broken porcelain, rivets and springs;
living off the bones of the railway.
You'll make your entry unannounced,
in the distraction of buddleia throwing its slender legs
out in the air from nothing,
from off the highest parapets, cheap
attention-seeking shrub from somewhere
like nowhere. But here
you'll identify your own private genes,
a quiet specimen-bloom seeded in junk,
and no use to any of us; only an intricate bee-trap
composed in simple waxy petals, waiting
for the bees to reinvent their appetite.
as we get settled, where we find ourselves
undiscovering the city,
its lost works, disestablished
under the bridges. There's no more bargaining
for melons and good brass buttons.
We share your niche
and crouch as the falling sun
shines through smoke, and the lampposts
fail to light the night to the place all buses go.
© Peter Daniels
First prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition 2008, with the Ted Hughes Environmental Poetry Prize.
Mr Luczinski Takes a Tram
like a fairground machine:
permits him to sway with the tram,
and neo-baroque stucco.
his second cousins twice removed:
coming home from the market,
between fellow-passengers.
is not quite threadbare enough.
there's nowhere it can take him.
is a field of dandelions and a bluebell wood.
© Peter Daniels
Published 2009 in The North
| EDITING SERVICES
| PRONOUN PRESS
35 Benthal Road, London N16 7AR. 020 8806 6121. Email me
.