“Reflections: Deptford to Ladywell”

I searched for

The sublime

Sometime

Last Sunday

In May

Beneath cherry blossom

Outside the post office in

Deptford

Crunched-up lager cans

By a sleeping drunks’s feet

On the bench, lay

Like broken barques on

The shoreline

It was half past eleven am

The sun in

An ultramarine sky

Amid clouds, like sailcloths

I’d been trying hard to recollect emotion

In tranquility, my hand was propped on my jaw

But the Romantic era had finished

Long before, and now when you saw

Nature, you needed to pause and reflect,

An ironic reflex

Bulldozers cracking the ground

Housing blocks pushed up, new-builds abound

In the cathedral of scaffolding

A man in an unwashed red T-shirt

Span round and punched his

Fist through the air, someone had

Answered his prayer, I jumped back

And recollected last night

The Bird’s Nest, the south-east's Colony Room

A misplaced Madonna rattling bangles

Who mangles her phrases

And swings handbags of gin

Transvestite hipster, lipstick

Stuck on with Pritt-stick

She blows kisses, and whispers, ah boys,

Don’t you miss me?

Growling no-gooders, noonday boozers,

Half-time bandits, hissing Jezebels, dirty rebels,

Motorbike jeans, fags rolled into seams

Low-lit, orange tassel-fringed lamps, draught beers on tap, the

Hungover wrecks, NHS specs,

Thin-limbed runner beans, with tattoos up

Their necks, swearing, then kissing or

Falling and crying, while peroxide femme fatales

With fake pelisse shoulders,

Blow rings of smoke, blink eyelids

And smoulder

Birds of all feathers come here and clink, slump on the benches

Or perch high on chrome chairs, huddle round tuns

Filled with sharp-pointed yuccas

Lit by fairy lights in dusk,

Teeth are falling out, quick

Fill up the glasses and put in the tusks

Is this the sublime?

I’m back at the cherry tree, and we’re off for a stroll

My partner and me, filled with tranquility,

On Brookmills Road, curving past crescents, into

Friendly Street, a right turn, then left onto St John’s

And up to the riveted bridge, with its bright painted scene

By the station

Turn up Tyrwhitt Road, cars bumper to bumper,

Did you bring another jumper?

This road goes on for miles,

Warmth in the shadows of gardens

Glimpsed from sideways

We pass the hedged-in terraced houses

Victorian, late Georgian, high-built and handsome

Is this the sublime?

Hilly Fields, laid out before us

A cricket game being played far off

A man on his back by a chestnut tree

Dancing with bongos, an accordion squeezed

We round the hill, and descend to the village

Of Ladywell, a church steeple, a green, then on the corner

A tavern, so-named

I remember the tall trees, plane and poplar

casting shadows

White petals fallen from peonies

Dot the pavements like a wedding

We missed

I recollect ordering Sunday roast

From my phone on an app

I had a pint and a soda and lime

For me, well, this was sublime