Philip Gross
Boffins
Rabbit pasture. A low cove. A hint of a beach
nude bathers might consider,
with a view
of the steelworks three miles off over estuary
water that is still brown even
when it is blue…
and a concrete slipway. That’s where it crawled,
creaked and cranked to the sea,
the machine –
quite what, no one will swear to. But there was an
establishment, with boffins, like a wartime
job creation scheme
for the too-intelligent, not safe to release
into battle, egghead duffers,
vaguely innocent
as country parsons…while on its legs,
tracks or treads or whatever
it had, down it went
leaving a hippo-fart of bubbles, forging out
into the mud-mist, in the tide wind
over silt fields.
It might be squatting there still – gone native
with crustaceans? waiting on the hour
of Britain’s need?
glum-struck and sulking, rusting to an outline
filled with more and more space
and time to brood
on where their sweet logics would lead us,
those boffins, and how it got out
while the going was good.
Page(s) 59
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