Cobweb skies anticipate the sun
Veiling shadows hide the winter's scars
Buildings merge to an infinity of one
On a skyline cut by chains of moving cars.
Beyond the curtain blue of morn horizon
Myriad starlings cluster in confusion
Quizzical lawyers - nature's deputies
Adorned in sober black profusion.
"What say you, heralds, to the passers-by?"
In vain their wisdom falls on human ear
No judge or clerk of court to tell us why
In this, their courtroom in the open air.
From buttressed, lofty church, they scan the heights
An unobservant audience wends the streets
Silent, non-communicative and dumb
With un-seeing eyes and hands that never meet.
Horatio surveys Trafalgar Square
Of matchbox cars - crammed amorphous shapes
Alone, aloof from the relentless hum
Of robots bees drawn in by fatal threads.
St. Martin's bells peel through crystal skies
To steel and concrete giants, black and stale
Grey Macadam's highways intersperse
The blood-red buses pace like glistening snails.
Below:
A passer-by in London's metal world
Oblivious to all, so deep in thought
Recalled to life by brash un-nerving protest
Of irate taxi, punctuating silent short
The birds gaze on the brollied robot still
Compelled he knows not why through naked streets
To humdrum gloomy office, routine day -
The huge glass box - metallic burrow sickens him
Resounding to the ordered click of keys
Like morons beating out an endless code
That no one understands
Or if they do - grows meaningless with repetition.
Yet swirling in the live, pulsating breeze
Fine verdant tendrils clamber greying stones
To make a velvet cushion for their court
Loquacious lawyers presiding over homes
Of faceless figures, regards us with suspicion
Only they can know what freedom means.
(written in 1969)
(c) Poet in the woods 2013
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