Celebrating ten years of this blog with two new versions of one of the first poems published here: “My City Calls” typed up as a cityscape around a Gothic Cathedral and as a church bell.
The additional letters at the end might be the notes of the bells – but they are also a clue to the identity of the city!
You can click on the visual poems to read the text more clearly and go to the plain text via the link above.
We are the bricklayers: we lay the next layer of bricks in colours of coal and cream and mustard and rust, and the next and the next, where it fits, where it clicks, bricks upon bricks upon bricks.
We are the people who have made the big city.
We have walked here over the hills, we have sailed here and settled, we have woven the brittle wattle and cast the wayward clay into bricks and levelled the luminous limestone for thousands of years. Our stories still run underneath the pavement, in the veins of the hidden rivers.
II.
We are the bricks: We come in in all sizes, in all shades of beige and brown and black, the walls next to each other and often the bricks, mixed, a mosaic, haphazard and rough, like the bark of a London plane-tree.
We are the people who make up the big city.
We have moulded and sawed, we have woven and sown, we have carried and ferried and bartered on the market. We have brought up and taught, we have cared for and cured, invented, imagined, and immortalised.
Das Leben hatte Überfluß versprochen und sog dich an, ein buntes Labyrinth; schon mittendrin hat es sein Wort gebrochen, und deine Klagen stürzen in den Wind. Was auch von heute an geschehen möge, mag unerwartet sein und wunderbar, du magst’s als Lust erfahren oder Segen,– doch ist es nicht, was dir verheißen war.
Die Zeit flieht schneller, immer schneller hin, und desto mehr, je weniger verbleibt… Die Hoffnung, die doch unerschöpflich schien, verkehrt sich langsam doch in Bitterkeit: Denn zuviel Tun und Trachten war vergebens – auch jenes, das vernünftig war und rein – und wird es bleiben, trotz geballten Strebens, und war vergebens schon von vornherein.
I did not read the book I took I did not cast a glance not once I took the bus and dreamt no end I wrote some verse of love and stuff I dreamt that in the street we’d meet and summer would return and burn and that would be the date from fate: the sun and you and me all three
This playful verse from a London double-decker bus was actually written in mid-August, when it should be bright and hot everywhere; yet the weather has always been unpredictable and is now turning seriously unstable. In this poem, the summer is not returning after the period of winter but after a long, dull, cool break between early and late heatwaves.
Christina Egan 