At Gardham Lock
Canals bring back a past we never had:
transport that knew to take its time,
those low-browed cottages where sad
women waited for husbands to come home,
with pallid daughters coughing from the damp
to end in churchyards long before their mothers
or disappear in water till the thump
of a keel turned them up to face their brothers.
Now, places of birdsong, reeds and rushes,
with English flag as memory’s fleur-de-lys,
a yellow phoenix springing from the ashes
of humdrum lives we can no longer see:
be-whiskered men, their horses on the towpath,
half-laden barges idling from wharf to wharf.
Pocklington Canal, Melbourne, East Riding
Page(s) 33
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