This isn’t poetry, just me being indulgent on a Sunday night….
I was born in London, went to university in London and still love my home town, even though I will never live there again.
This song always takes me back to living in central London……a great song about hopes, dreams, loneliness.
This isn’t poetry, just me being indulgent on a Sunday night….yet once more. Sorry! ;)
I was born in London, went to university in London and still love my home town, even though I will never live there again.
This is an old ad for Capital Radio, using the even older song ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’ and updating it a bit. Well I think it’s funny!
This isn’t poetry, just me being indulgent on a Sunday night….repeatedly!
I was born in London, went to university in London and still love my home town, even though I will never live there again.
Here’s Stormzy (one of my favourite fellow Londoners) with, um, Ed Sheeran:
This isn’t poetry, just me being indulgent on a Sunday night…. for the third time!
I was born in London, went to university in London and still love my home town, even though I will never live there again.
How could I not share the great ‘Werewolves of London’?
This isn’t poetry, just me being indulgent on a Sunday night….again……
I was born in London, went to university in London and still love my home town, even though I will never live there again.
This is Ray Davies also loving London:
This isn’t poetry, just me being indulgent on a Sunday night….
I was born in London, went to university in London and still love my home town, even though I will never live there again.
I also love Science Fiction.
So here is a lovely video of London as she has appeared in Science Fiction TV and Film, made a while ago to to promote the Science Fiction WorldCon in 2014:
Emerging from the Tube you clothe me
with dusty breath and ambient noise
I feel you living restlessly
lifeforce surging through centuries
pulsing through busy streets
I turn a corner and a garden churchyard
filled with lunchers and tourists
leads me to rest
Leaving you in a plane I reach down
pet your raised questioning head
sooth and smooth your black silky fur
I have run from you as you’ve
preyed upon my soul my heart
your begging eyes always
bring my return
Copyright © 2020 Kim Whysall-Hammond
My love poem to my old home town, lying quietly at present, but she will shake off the blues and arise……
Over twenty years after the end
gardens still had hollow mounds
or curved corrugated tin domes half buried
some doing duty as tool sheds
many simply as they were
when the bombing stopped
full of the detritus of nights spent sheltering
while death flew overhead
Mounds and tunnels riddled
our playing fields
dry brick-lined hiding places
against bombers seeking factories
and factory workers
to blast and wreck
we used them for massive games of hide and seek
London streets had gaps, play spaces
festooned with stately spires of
purple flowers, amid mossy rubble
the occasional crumpled saucepan
so much broken crockery
As a child, our father collected bullets and bomb shards
watched fighters fall crashing out of the sky
and ran to collect souvenirs while the metal was still hot
I and my brothers knew wars last remnants
and played amongst ghosts
Copyright © 2019 Kim Whysall-Hammond
In Memoriam
TWENTY bridges from Tower to Kew –
Wanted to know what the River knew,
Twenty Bridges or twenty-two,
For they were young, and the Thames was old
And this is the tale that River told:-
“I walk my beat before London Town,
Five hours up and seven down.
Up I go till I end my run
At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington.
Down I come with the mud in my hands
And plaster it over the Maplin Sands.
But I’d have you know that these waters of mine
Were once a branch of the River Rhine,
When hundreds of miles to the East I went
And England was joined to the Continent.
“I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds,
And the giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent’s Park into Camden Town.
And I remember like yesterday
The earliest Cockney who came my way,
When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,
With paint on his face and a club in his hand.
He was death to feather and fin and fur.
He trapped my beavers at Westminster.
He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer,
He killed my heron off Lambeth Pier.
He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,
Flint or bronze, at my upper fords,
While down at Greenwich, for slaves and tin,
The tall Phoenician ships stole in,
And North Sea war-boats, painted and gay,
Flashed like dragon-flies, Erith way;
And Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek
Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,
And life was gay, and the world was new,
And I was a mile across at Kew!
But the Roman came with a heavy hand,
And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,
And the Roman left and the Danes blew in –
And that’s where your history-books begin!”
Flying over cities is glorious
London’s furnace reaching for the sky
The nested curving of Amsterdam canals
England on Guy Fawkes Night
Firework chrysanthemums blooming upwards
Colouring the belly of the plane
Shimmering ice dazzling in the cockpit
So many planes alongside
Taking the polar route
Diverting around a war zone
Noting shell bursts far to portside
Glamorously frightening
Heading out across the Atlantic
Passing over container shipping
Waiting for Azorean volcanoes on the horizon
The miracle of heavy flight
Watching Jumbos lumber into the air
Carrying hopes and dreams
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
