Urban Springtime
Petals and broken glass
Line the festal way.
Accidental emeralds gleam
Amid silken pink blossom
Trodden underfoot,
Sodden and sad:
Softness and sharpness
Mingling in the fallen trash.
Ten green bottles
Smashed against my wall,
Ten green bottles
Didn’t accidentally fall.
Drifts of pink petals
Candy-floss coloured
Blow lazily in hot wind
Drying to nothingness
In a few days, gone.
Some rubbish I can live with.
I wrote this poem some years back when we lived in a large village in the Midlands. It had been a big change from the tiny village in the middle of nowhere, where I could walk at night with only starlight and moonlight to guide me, and where the nights were so quiet I could hear the wind in the wheat on a summer night.
It’s been a bigger and more shocking change to move to a port town, and even walking the ancient woodlands a few minutes’ walk from my home I can still hear the roar of traffic, see the rubbish and mourn the damage.
We are stewards and we have not done our job very well.
When my niece and nephew came to America from China they asked if they could walk on the grass.
They were accustomed to walking on concrete and dodging broken glass. They thought the grass was dangerous somehow.
Only the long grass…!