Ragged Edges

Today myself and Sarah walked around the west side of the Peninsula. We cut along narrow lanes lined with barbed wire offering odd glimpses of an industrial wasteland in the middle of mutating into something habitable. I started to get a bit nervous as we approached two gigantic diggers emptying huge amounts of soil into a floating barge. There didn’t seem to be another human soul for miles and I was struck by how unusual it was that in the middle of London we could feel so alone. Of course, on closer inspection, the diggers had drivers inside them who patiently stopped their mammoth task to let us pass. When I got home, I wrote this poem…

Ragged Edges

As we pick our way across the huge concrete roundabout,
the sunshine shifts into grey spatterings of rain.
The wind rattles through the marshes,
as if the poltergeists of industrial contamination
were warning us away from barbed wire lanes,
the startling bleakness of gas girders
circling up into the sky.

The graffiti bunkers wink their loss of purpose,
gigantic cranes swing their arms
over the windmills of water.
The mouths of diggers eat into the landscape
with an obscene hunger
as the crumpled earth is fed to the river.

We reclaim ourselves from the murkiness of the Thames,
as if this were a city we could walk through when we’ve died,
the survival of rhubarb just another miracle
of what can be saved from the waste,
those moments of silence in the midst of the metropolis,
the surprise of overcoming isolation.

Where we can lose ourselves
in the architecture of the future
and the maps are fluid at high tide.