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Trade Winds

Stuart Butler

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Along Brunel’s iron road
Where engines once glowed
On the Great Western Railway;
Where rustics in The Load of Hay
Make their unkempt way to Rotherhithe
For the chance of work and a life
Of toil, behind the walls
Where Empire bids and calls.

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 In the night time gloom and dark
Fire envelopes the Cutty Sark:
Hear the creaking winch and barnacled anchor
Slip beneath the glass towered global banker
Full nine fathoms deep
In the dry docklands of memory’s sleep.

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 Where has it all gone?
See the sepia picture on the long
Board room table in Canary Wharf?
It cries tears when the wind blows north.

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 Then the big screen pubs are full
With men watching big screen football,
Flying Emirates to Arsenal.

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 And still the rain falls.

© Stuart Butler

Notes

I wrote this after a London walk with my mate, Sheeraz; we had just escaped from the Gloucestershire rains to find publicans worrying about high tide on the Thames; I post this late after a holiday in Suffolk, with the ‘papers full of the terrible floods in Bangladesh

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/trade-winds/