Tides: A Book of Poems

Chapter 10: BIRMINGHAM—1916

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About This Book

A sequence of lyric poems that range from intimate rural and seasonal scenes—Cotswold hills, gardens, ploughing—to meditations on love, memory, and wartime loss, with occasional civic and political reflections. The voice uses vivid pastoral imagery and simple, songlike rhythms to register everyday labour, landscape, and personal feeling, moving between quiet domestic observation and memorial or civic address. The collection is organized as short, standalone poems that juxtapose pastoral tranquility with the disruptions of modern conflict.

BIRMINGHAM—1916

Once Athens worked and went to see the play,
And Thomas Atkins kissed the girls of Rome,
In council in Victoria Square to-day
Are grey-beard Nazarenes, with shop and home
And counting-house and all the friendly cares
That Joseph knew; in Bull Ring markets meet
Gossips as once at Babylonian fairs,
And Helen walks in Corporation Street.

Now Troy is Homer; and of Nazareth
Grave histories are of one love that was strong;
Athens is beauty; Rome an immortal death;
And Babylon immortal in a song....
Perplexed as ours these cities were of old;
And shall our name greatly as these be told?