Victoria Terrace

(An Addingham Poem) With the strength of gentleness, sparrows make love upon the windowsill, frigid glass pane pulsates within the pageant of nature, numerous battle scared plumage float wanting, towards earthly cracks that conceals another world, where rain and sleet beat down a forest of subversive weeds, if only to perjure hope and fortitude. The wind! Screams imperfections, orchestrates the misery of the telegraph wire, summons the hardy, those across the sawmill dam, there where the village sons live on, as faceless images upon the park epitaph. The moon abandons the paperboy hides behind a turbulent haze, the greyness segregating the dawn from the night, as a hundred kettles sing behind dimly lit backyard windows, and a hundred harmonies perfume, the bowel of the tippler. Row upon row of decrepit doorsteps host resident jugs, those that waits in anticipation of the ladle, whose wholesome contents still encompass the warmth of the beast. Through the mist, a stony siren executes the industrial anthem, a musical excursion into pain and manipulation, a weaving shed that creates a spinneret of dreams, a threshold to one’s hopes. “Yet! Given nothing more, than a wry sense of insecurity.” © Harry J Horsman 1999