There’s something here that all poets should recognize. Perhaps the feeling of alienation from what goes on around you in a city (or anywhere that man has set out his infernal stall) that comes to everyone sooner or later.

I don’t know. Some seem to swim along with the sharks very comfortably. Maybe the whole point is that there are too many of us that do so as it is bad news for everybody else! Anyway this gentle piece is about the coming back, the return to the alienated self.

RIVER STATIONS

An aimless voyager;

a tourist in my own city;

a novice in the role of pilgrim –

I was all of these, it seemed, and none of them.

 

I just cannot remember what it was

that prompted me to take the boat

along the cavalcade of River Stations

I see now that there were irregular,

careful preparations: plans so secret

that I was the last to know of them.

It was like looking in at my own window

from across the street and studying a face there

I know I ought to have recognized.

Or, like finding a pair of jeans so long forgotten

that wearing them again I am a stranger to myself.

 

Strange indeed that of all the available

transport systems I never thought before

to catch the obvious River Bus:

the stations were familiar enough.

I’d used them constantly as metaphors;

as allegorical constellations, in my work.

 

The unfamiliar, comfortable fellowship;

by-passing weirs and threading locks,

disembarking and re-embarking;

crossing latticed walkways made of iron

awakened my too long procrastinated, re-emigration home.

I was, and still am, the prodigal returning

to most loved places

he has never properly known. 

 

Tags: I am the prodigal returning to most loved places he has never properly known.