One Street - Peter

What a cosmopolitan place my One Street (the Bridgewater canal) is. This morning I met Peter doing maintenance on his boat. Peter and his wife are over from Australia and are spending 6 months on the canals.

In the original One Street concept it was a marriage between images from one street and poems relating to those images. I am afraid that I could never write poetry to go along with my One Street images. Here is a poem from Jo Bell, who last year was appointed canal poet laureate, yes such a post does exist.

Spring Time at the Boatyard

You can keep your cuckoos.
We hear Spring's first song
in the sound of angle-grinders,
brazen as a mating call across the yard:
the saw blades and the welders
working between weathers
like a nesting bird; and swarf
as bright as daffodils on workshop floors.

You can keep your catkins;
we have rust like pollen on our skins.
We walk between steel shells
and smell the fresh blue boiler suits
of all the coming days,
when warmth will stretch our hulls
and make of summer afternoons a shed
for building this year's stories.

A lot of work goes into keeping the boats on One Street shipshape.

In other news from One Street, the swan that was sitting on her nest opposite the house before we went away last week now has 5 cygnets. I passed them this morning.