Aquarium

Chapter 26: Hope

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About This Book

A sequence of vivid lyric poems juxtaposes urban modernity and sensual escapism, shifting between images of aquaria, industrial streets, cathedrals, cabarets and cultivated gardens. Rich sensory detail and decadent diction evoke crowded factories, neon-lit cafés, and intimate interiors while poems alternate social satire, melancholic reverie and pastoral relief. Several pieces use theatrical vignettes and musical rhythms to render characters and scenes indirectly, while others address sacred space, memory and longing through ornate imagery. The book’s structure groups shorter, imagistic poems into two parts that balance urban manners with curving, often erotic or elegiac, meditations.

Hope

I ALWAYS sing into the night

To strangle innermost affright

When faces, twisted masks of lust,

Leer through the murk like yellow dust.

And varnished voices frailly flit

Down shuddering alleys sparsely lit.

Old harlots lurch with ghostly feet

That agonisingly entreat.

I think I’m hearing ever after

The echoes of polluted laughter,

And I can never be alone

But I must hear a hollow groan.

My mind, as in a nightmare, sees

Young bodies rotting with disease,

Strange scabs of mauve and wizened heads,

Sad hospitals with rows of beds....

Is there no harbour, no escape,

Away from whoring, blood and rape?

Two lovers on a bench: and I

Can hear a new-born baby’s cry.