Workington

A quick look at the sea before heading home.

I found my copy of Peter Armstrong's poems that I was looking for.

The Red-Funnelled Boat

Comrades, since it's evident
that the voices teasing us at nightfall
with their inklings of another island
where Jerusalem might be builded,
are at best of shady origin,
and more likely beg the question
of the demon in the synapse,

let's go line up at the jetty
for the red-funnelled boat to take u
by black-watered sea-lochs
to its approximate asylum
- aliéné, égalité, fraternité
inscribed on the gateposts
and the inside of the inmates' foreheads -

where we might hope to be permitted,
under the benevolent dictatorship
of the monthly needle,
to establish our republic
of tweeds and decorum:
one last collective indulgence
in the dreams of the mind politic.

Between the ashlar ward-blocks
and the rusticated boundary,
the light will be democratic
on the backs of garden details
and the chronically second-sighted,
the electrodes reserved only
for those weeping over their Isaiah.

Tell those who came after
how we boarded in one body,
feeling, but not flinching at
the bow's one long incision
down the firth's dark mirror:
the red stump of its funnel lifted
as high as it was ploughing under.