the Embankment

Above the music from the pub on the corner,

a bottle’s throw from the Thames Embankment,

and the noise from the eateries housed

in the arches of the railway embankment,

spaces where once there had been workshops,

if you stand still in Bank End, Southwark,

you can hear the squeal of commuter trains

crossing the river to Cannon Street station –

built on the site of a trading post

of the mediaeval Hanseatic League,

exporting wool, importing beeswax.

 

***

 

When the first Brixton Riot began

I was staying in a small hotel

just off the Embankment in Pimlico

on the opposite bank of the river.

One night, I woke to the sound of dripping.

I turned on the bedside lamp. Water

was trickling from the ceiling

through the light fitting, down the flex and the shade

onto the carpet. I went to Reception,

and woke the Night Porter. I could hear

distant sirens, and thought at first they had been

summoned for me – then imagined another’s

anxiety, and their brief comfort. I had looked

through the hotel’s glass-panelled front door

and seen fires lighting the southern sky.

 

***

 

I think of those for whom accidents are never

benign, those who live without dignity,

and those who know nothing but hardship.

This a place of angry strangers,

among cut and tailored granite and limestone,

shipped in blocks on the sea and the river

from Portland Bill and Cornwall’s Lamorna Cove.

 

***

 

Once, when I was eight and with my mother,

after we had been shopping at John Lewis

on the Finchley Road, as we entered

the nearby Finchley Road Underground

to take the tube train to Golders Green,

I noticed an ambulance parked at the kerb –

and then two ambulance men approaching us

carrying a stretcher. The body was wrapped

in a grey blanket. On the covered torso

was a bowler hat and a briefcase.

Between the body and the stretcher’s edge

there was a long, black, furled umbrella.

My mother explained what had happened, and why.

She was one who longed for oblivion –

but death came at a time of its choosing.

 

***

 

Trapped in that liminal space between present

and past, between being and remembering,

that eternal picture show, what might fix

a troublesome head, a troubled heart?

In Tate Modern – a gallery re-purposed,

in this city of money and invention,

from a disused power station on Bankside –

across its spacious mezzanine floor

a little girl is cart-wheeling. O the

banality of joy!