Jude Rosen’s Poems Of Place

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It is my delight to publish these five poems from Jude Rosen’s new collection Reclamations from London’s Edgelands published next Monday 9th September at a joint launch event with Derrick Porter’s The Art of Timing at the Rose & Crown, 53 Hoe St, Walthamstow, E17 4SA . There will be readings and you are all invited to attend.

Sculpture of porters in London Fields

Black Path

A rumour of a parting in the green sea –

Black Path, the ancient dirt track cut diagonally

from London to Walsingham or Waltham Abbey

known as the Templars’ Path or Porters’ Way

when hauliers drove reluctant cattle and sheep

to Smithfields market, and dragged hand-carts

filled with eggs and fruit and wilting cabbage

to Spitalfields. Black Path may have been named

after the plague or the trail across Black Breeches

or the bridge over Blackmarsh or ‘Blackbridge’

as Shortlands Sewer was known, or the clinker and ash

surface to the route laid down in the 18th century.

Dave’s mum recalled, when she was a girl around

1910, they still drove sheep to market

through Porters’ Field and when they built the prefabs

after the war, they left a diagonal gap

through the estate, in memory of the drove,

even though the practice had died out long ago.

The Tower

Flickering in the background on tv screens,

the Orbit’s red mesh whirls in a drunken coil,

its helter-skelter body torn and bashed,

a stripped tin can no one shows affection for

by hanging a football shirt around it

or leaving a pint of milk by a door.

The Orbit’s origins are concealed

in the iron ore from the Omarska mines,

scene of massacre in the Bosnian War.

The survivors who are denied a memorial

claim the Orbit  – Arcelor-Mittal  Tower –

as their own twisted monument in exile

standing on excavated ground that now

has been covered over with fresh soil.

Which Wick?

Wandering on Wyke Rd, you knew you were

in old country, a Latin vicus  – settlement –

or a Viking vik – inlet or creek – the weak point

to invade, then a trading post. In Middle English

it became –wich in salt brine wells and spas:

Droitwich or Nantwich, or a –wich which was

a landing place for goods special to that place

like wool-wich –Woolwich – or a trait of the place

such as green-wich – Greenwich – or a -wick where

the village grew up around dairy farms like

Hackney Wick – the 13th Century  ferm of Wyk –

or around dairy produce, cheese wick – Chiswick –

and goat wick – Gatwick.  Just as a candle

dies down leaving only the trace of a wick,

when the land disappears, so too does the language.

Merisc

We slid off our cycles as we encountered

the slick mud on the path at the opening

to the water flats of the Lea Valley reserve,

the filtered silt preserving the life of birds.

An Asian man stopped me to ask the way

to Kingfisher Woods. The marsh, that in full

spring flush boasts a hundred football matches

in a day, this day was almost deserted.

The ground sprung up as we trudged, lifting us back

to the surface of the grass. It’s green, it’s so green,

Lucia gasped. Yes, these were fields of emeralds!

She strode across the territory, chanting

Marciare per non marcire – ‘March rather than rot!’

while the merisc stretched out, sublimely indifferent.

Incantation to the Marsh

Mossy carpet, grassy knolls, leaf-lined holm,

marshlands, harsh lands, green fable!

When I fall in a myoclonic jerk in dreams,

you’re there to catch me so I don’t fall through

the floodplains into a burial pit but

recover, without need of an archeologist.

Poems copyright © Jude Rosen

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from Paekakariki Press