Michael Coy | + Follow Poet |
Rhyme | + Fav Poem | Comment | Email | Print |

Circumspice 2

Part 2 - The Great Fire of London, 1666

Just think of a town, put up with no plan, 
where people build houses wherever they can. 
The streets twist and dip, hugging ditches and streams, 
and safety's a thing of which nobody dreams. 

There aren't any rules, or best practices, codes, 
regulations, fire stations, no hydrants or nodes. 
The street where you live has no concrete, just clay, 
and it's narrow, foul-smelling, and no light of day 

can squeeze in. Your ground floor is brick-built and stout, 
but your upstairs is flimsy and jetties right out, 
almost touching your neighbour's. You thus form a tunnel 
through which rats, cats and faeces can constantly funnel. 

Well, come with me now to meet Thomas and Jane, 
who live, work and worry in just such a lane: 
it's always called "Pudding", which gives us a clue - 
for baking is what all the people here do. 

September the second, the year sixty-six, 
and Old Mother Nature's been up to her tricks: 
we haven't seen rain since the start of the war, 
and timbers are shrinking, and drier than straw. 

Tom's oven malfunctions. The house catches fire. 
Our instinct, in peril?  To try to get higher. 
Tom, Jane, the children, and Sukie, the maid 
(Sukie is thirteen, and very afraid) 

climb out on the roof.  Oh, the smoke and the heat! 
The roof tiles are baking, and hurting our feet! 
We've all got to jump to the roof to our left: 
but don't glance below as you're leaping the cleft! 

But Sukie can't do it.  It's asking too much. 
She'll be the first to be killed by the Dutch. 
The signals aren't vaulting across her synapses. 
She's lost from our sight when the storey collapses. 

Four days blazed this greatest of all conflagrations, 
engulfing some thousands of poor habitations 
and scores of old churches, whether timber or stone. 
The tally of people will never be known. 

A square mile of ruin.  A city destroyed. 
A blackened and acrid and comfortless void. 
Saint Paul's is a shell, its rubble still smoking. 
But who is that gentleman, measuring, poking?

Please Login to post a comment