Travelling day

Themes for travel, two first inspired by Helen Sargeant last insipered by Salford, of course:

Letter in November

Love, the world

Suddenly turns, turns colour. The streetlight

Splits through the rat's-tail

Pods of the laburum at nine in the morning.

It is the Arctic

This little black

Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies's hair.

There is a green in the air,

Soft, delectable.

It cushion me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.

I think I may be enourmous,

I am so stupidly happy,

My Wellingtons

Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.

Two times a day

I pace it, sniffing

The barbarous holly with its viridian

Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of old corpes.

I love them.

I love them like history.

The apples are golden, Imagine it -

My seventy trees

Holding their gold- rubby balls

In a thick grey death-soup,

Their million

Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate.

Nobody but me

Walks the waist-hight wet.

The irreplaceable

Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

- Sylvia Plath-

”The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. Its time for protecting and securinng things and for making sure you've got so many supplies as you can. It's nice to gather together everything you posses as close to you as possible, to store up warmth and your thought and burrow yourself into deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and very own.”

-Tove Jansson-

Dirty Old Town

I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed a girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town

Clouds a drifting across the moon
Cats a prowling on their beat
Spring's a girl in the street at night
Dirty old town
Dirty old town

Heard a siren from the docks
Saw a train set the night on fire
Smelled the spring on the smoky wind
Dirty old town
Dirty old town

I'm going to make me a good sharp axe
Shining steel tempered in the fire
Will chop you down like an old dead tree
Dirty old town
Dirty old town

I met my love by the gas works wall
Dreamed a dream by the old canal
Kissed a girl by the factory wall
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Dirty old town
Dirty old town

-Ewan Maccoll-