I Don'T Miss London
I don’t miss the city,
the metropolis I once knew was built
on the edge of a never-never land.
I miss just this: a green half-acre,
a cultivated fenced enclosure
with a round bandstand; a Victorian structure
surrounded by a bed of carnations –
prodigious red carnation.
That small public garden
exists now as a child’s memory.
I am told that the wooden rotunda,
the pleasant plot, the carnations,
the velvety carnations,
have all been expunged by the expungers.
In that charmed place, a ten-year-old girl
once talked to my ten-year-old body
as if it were much older.
It was then that I saw,
coming over a distant horizon,
my post-adolescent puberty
driving a superannuated Morris Oxford.
The car and the girl
have probably been erased
by those whose job
will always be to erase lovely things,
but I should like to go back there
before my body forgets
to treasure the inconsequential.
Now with my thread-bare mind,
I return again
to that wrought-iron,
railed patch, of green city space;
to be among the deep red carnations,
the long since bloomed
carnations.
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