Poem 392

This was influenced by a night I worked as an extra on a shoot for a tv dramatised documentary about colonial immigrants … we were in one of the old brick storehouses on Queens Wharf dressed in period clothes with horses and carts … the past felt close …

( I like the image of the moon, hooves ‘startling’ puddles, lantern flames like moths, the rolled white eye of lamb, the rhyme of unbrained cranes and the assonance/alliteration of still dawn derelict wharves … )

King Horse

On the waterfront
white plastic teaspoon of moon
afloat in a coffee black sky
miasmas of last century's cargoes
waft across the squid boat lights
cutting down hard and white
as sheets of paper
                                       there's a wind
blowing through the bricks
shifting straw and dirt over windows
letting loose on the plane of air
old years old ships
                                       old splinters

ghosts are cold the wharves always
freezing
                hooves startle puddles
flames chug like moths in glass chimneys
of old lanterns
                              these are the nighttime hustings
King Horse broker of chaff
                                                      rolled white eye
of lamb inside the squat shadow of our first
refrigerated ship chilling the green seas
to England

                        King Horse
                        dockyard men
and shipbuilders the Customs
and the empty-handed unmanned unbrained
           cranes grappling their shadows together
on the still dawn derelict wharves

                                                                    here and now
is when the bodies come in