Suburb

Awkward trees look naked
and freeze on ruined streets,
the broken swing,
the rust, the moss, the plans
shelved, the endlessness of
tickertape parades postponed
for wars won elsewhere in history,
unwritten, in the mouths of dogs
in the breath of the vixen
hidden from the children,
crouching under sheds
in the evident chill of a nervous
Spring, in the very socket of the eye
of the Viking skull, unseeing in
its first light for 1000 years.

All these things are there, if you look
from your window at the right time,
with your head at just the right incline,
with hope set square; look there,
look there, there is wonder there.

You needn’t see suburbia as
an all conquering monster.
Hidden in its crumbling red
brick creases is enough literary stuff
to forge a canon from.

Just look at the tatty placcy bags;
improvised scarecrows guarding
the good life in neat allotments,
hugging embankments
cut by decree in
the iron-willed age.
An almost audible clash
of daytime TV with the aspirations of
the temperance league,
the libraries, and bowling greens,
the disquieting way a sudden burst
of sunshine from ardent March clouds
transforms a desperate parade of low rent shops
into an arcade of light, with the Bingo hall even,
suddenly beautiful in its apologetic British nod
to art deco.

There is more love there,
a million more achievable dreams,
in one square mile of this bus stop
after bus stop, tarmac, hoarding,
take-away town, than in all your
awesome deserts, and un-visitable forests
we’d kill to see and kill by seeing.

If we can forgive this dump its ugliness,
and let for once the sunshine perform
its alchemy on filthy bridges,
then with our collective love
we can keep barbarism at bay,
letting the wild things rip
each other to shreds
out there somewhere
in the wilderness.