We walked along the old roads of Anglo-Saxon Kings
We walked by the river and saw the silent white swans
The fashionable people fill
The fashionable restaurants
The pigeons congregate for scraps
Not together, but not apart.
You and I trod in the path
Of Ancient England.
We trod where a gold Queen looks out across
The marketplace.
We trod the staircase
Blackened with age
Built when Shakespeare’s daughter was alive
Here, amid the bustle
I watched you but
Let you walk
And turn into the applemarket
Did we watch the slime on
The dank river bricks
Slither down towards the water?
Did we wonder at the age of the
Bridge and who made it?
Could we hear the hooves clattern
Upon the wooden structure
And anneal the wheelwrights work?
Were all the words too distant to today?
Maybe the ancient story
Of a friendship began to move
Unrecognised across the sky
Perhaps you learned the pontifex
You would become
Peering into the Hogsmill’s silt
Where is the end, where the beginning?
Where the salmon leap
Where the stags do battle
Where seven kings were crowned
Here, where I toiled along in my mothers’ hand
Not protesting but wearied beyond belief
By her constant interruption of her own progress
Wanting to look at this or that vestment.
An endless journey on a broiling trolley bus –
Airless and ceaseless
Arriving home dirty enough to have
A bath and be amazed
At the blackness of my own feet.