heres a comission i did today for a 6th form history class
The Time-Membrane shudders and and warps, ruptures, and
the past leaks through, and we brush against them, these others,
who also walked these streets and loved this river, boon companion,
this bustling air, these autumnal regrets and pearlescent skies.
Who walked this way as we do,
who, unlanguaged and abandoned,
thrown ashore, without return passage,
in an unfamiliar climate, insinuating fog and the damp
clinging to the flesh. Lascars, say, sailors from the Bay of Bengal
or Gulf of Aden. We huddle with them
in some narrow doorway, seek shelter from the wind
and the hostility of strangers. In Poplar
where the East India men spend their wages,
by the docks where the masts make floating forests
and the rat-feet skid
on greasy cobbles.
The river is an arm of ocean, and, while reaching inward
also extends outward, off-island, where the trade winds carry us
and the gulls swoop on burly air. We feel the 16th century
crash over us, briny wave, carrying with it
its tobacco and tumult. The earth made so much wider then,
new continents painted fresh upon the map, the prairies
and those who peopled them. We see the boatyards
at Deptford and Rotherhithe
and we are also bunked in forecastle, storm-tossed, and we, in that
Tempest wrecked and cast ashore, air, enchanted music, Ariel
and wonders, tossing peanut shells to theatre floor
as our actors strut and fret their hour
upon the stage.
London is the place for me, as we alight at Tilbury
bilious river and foreboding skies and the city still in ruins.
Hopes in a suitcase and dressed in Sunday best. And we hear
the words Elizabeth spoke, also at Tilbury, where Kitchener sang
words rang strident I have the heart and stomach of a king
and a king of England too
before the beacons burned and the storm swept in, wild winds
and fire ships.
We see, in scrying mirror, Dee at Mortlake, wide river
and see also Marlowe, bleeding out on the stone setts, and
the words went with him, Faustus and Tamburlaine.
We see on the narrow beaches of broken terracotta and animal bones,
votive offerings, as all rivers tangle hands and Thames is also Ganges,
gods washed up here and coconut shells
curses and blessings carved on stones
committed to the waters and we are
there in the Kabbalistic backstreets of Whitechapel, there
with the Huguenot weavers, there
with the displaced and fled in fear
there with those escaping poverty or oppression,
those escaping war and famine,
there with the Gujaratis of Kenya and Uganda,
there with the freed slaves and the desperate,
and all languages mingling and tangling, caught
and knotted and love also
as promiscuous and entangled, together
all times coeval and confused, and all cultures.
Song on the streets, rough music, and drunk, spilling
out of taverns and into midnight all musics also mingled
and entangled, as all foot-patter and foot-tread
makes polyrhythms, intricate as rainfall
and before the city dreamed itself, and people passed this way
the river drifting into marsh, and the herons hunting
eels lithe and muscled, and the voles in their burrows and
wind sussurating in the reed-beds. Before the city dreamed itself
before Rome established the limits of its empire here, westward bound
of that dominion, before the first churches raised their steeples, before
the cathedral was build on Lud Hill, before fire razed it
and Wren rebuilt it, before bombs fell and sirens scoured the night
before we were born and walked it
feet upon the ancient stones.