Sidyngborne
For to mourn here
each day the Tudor Rose
is 99p, and the king loses nothing
on clay substrate sinking again
midstream in dead grass
with wrecked boats
where nothing lives
from Recreation Way
to Green Porch Close
and Holy Trinity Church
sometimes in grasswort
and golden samphires,
for protection against
the hard reed bed
look out at the Swale
under the new EU
directive is brown-red
and the unpeopled estate
is the mud of UK paper,
where the Fleet Streets conspired
amongst the migrant moths
near Ridham Docks
known by their fruits
of Euromix concrete
O watch ward over veil
at Christmas 1454
as the topsoil yields
a silver penny
that the mad gene carried
from France,
and containerboard a red knot
on Roman walk badly paved
the whistling postman
not from France but from
bourne stands sometimes sits
but does not beg
for it is charity
and he is old
and stays in the memory
like the Battle of Britain
or a Christmas fire.
I would walk the creek
near pipes of Milton Pipes
anon out the earth
and not say nothing
I would go to The Saxon Shore Way
formerly Church Marshes Country Park,
formerly a disused landfill site
to Toy Town
stand in middle of palm tree
roundabout or
with pylon in the middle
and ask, blind men
where am I? under venerated springs,
or a post industrial pilgrimage?
and said to song
as a place of inns and bore most
where it ought not to bear
at all, and it did not bear
at all where it ought
to have been borne most
