A Walk Down Canal Road In Strood

A Walk Down Canal Road In Strood.


If Dickens returned he wouldnt recognise the place,
Like a battered housewife with a broken face,
The hooting boats that chugged the tide,
And clanking cranes along the river side,
Are now rusting wrecks, offshored and globalised.

The Railway Tavern where I once used to drink,
Is now a gay bar seeking pounds that are pink,
Built where the Medway on a high spring tide,
Still rises to flood the snug with its filthy brime.

The call of a curlew in the misty fringe,
Drifts over the groaning recycling bins,
Sifting the shore where a soviet sub rests,
Beached like a whale, slowly rusting to death.

As whores in short skirts who work in spurts,
Seek paying strangers, their addictions curse,
Out from dusk to dawn in a life forlorn,
Is this the reason for which they were born ?

Clucking burglars prowl the midnight streets,
Needle famished, pathetic poppy thieves,
Whilst chains are drawn across front doors,
Flats full of single mothers fear the creaking floor.

In the morning workers walk the dog shit path,
Past concrete playgrounds devoid of grass,
Dodging the rabid pitbulls of chavs high on PCP,
Who seek the slow bleak death of this liberal liberty.

Then back along the same cruel street at night,
Tar black dark, lit with febrile orange light,
Where lurk gangs of hoodies who carry knives,
For whom 'respect' means more than human lives.

Hellfire Corner

This is a poem about the Second World War in Kent. The lines at the start of the fourth stanza relate to the attack on houses in Strood opposite the train station where my father lived. He was pulled out of the rubble and lost his sister and two cousins who lived next door to him.

Hellfire Corner is the name of my area in Kent area during the war.






Hellfire Corner.


My aunt Valerie still remembers,
The days of dogfights over Kent,
Long balmy nights of doodlebugs,
Red skies at night from sinister sunsets,
Aglow between verdant hop vines,
As London lay burning in the West,
Stuka swarms that scored the sky,
The engine scream of Iron Eagles,
Whose black flocks were flying forth,
Strafing and bombing all roads that ran,
Along the silver ribbons of river,
The Thames and Medway into Kent,
Hedgehopping along the coast,
Until deep within their trap,
The raptors slip raging from their mews,
Then rise to stoop and mantle,
Spitfires mauling the silver machines
Bullets break in the thin skin,
The cages of burning steel release,
A silken puff of sycamore seed,
That becomes a pappus of white,
As pilots drift gently to earth,
Upon delicate dandelion clocks,
As the roar of Merlin engines,
Were loping like lions overhead.


HMS Ajax lay in Chatham Docks,
Licking the wounds of the River Plate,
Then from a dismal Medway fog,
A 210 bomber came swooping down,
All her machine guns were blazing,
With the hell fury of rapid fire,
The shriek of bombs unleashed,
Echoed along the Medway flats,
Three fell into the burning river,
One in the mud beside the boat,
No casualties reported, only minor damage.


June 6th 1944 out of a drowsy sky,
Came wave after wave of bombers,
Washing over Gillingham and Chatham.
On their way to the D-Day beaches,
Then from above the sound of catastrophe,
Two B-26 Marauders crabbing,
Their wings crossed in flight,
Fell in flames upon the roofs of houses,
In Corporation Street and in Rainham,
The bodies of burnt crew members,
Were trapped within the cockpit,
Laying amidst the red and white roses,
Of suburban gardens in summer bloom.


A bomb was dropped in Darnley Road,
And three children were lost in Strood,
In two houses opposite the train station,
A stray bomb fell and blew them all away,
Child victims of the Baedeker Blitz,
The simple targets of Total War,
The white horses that pulled the carts,
Which the council had sent to collect,
The remains and remnants of the dead,
Wore black hoods over their heads,
So that they could not see the flames,
That still flickered amidst the rubble,
As the light of young lives went out,
In corners too deep for the fire crew to dig,
Whilst on the other side of the road,
A young boy stood on the platform selling papers,
Whose front page carried a photograph,
Of a little girl shot in the back,
Laying dead in a country lane,
She ran when she should have stayed,
Killed with the twitch of a trigger finger,
By a German pilot in a killing rage.

Four Black Horses in Strood High Street

Today I saw a beautiful funeral cortage led by four black horses, as I watched it pass the first few lines of this poem appeared.





Four Black Horses In Strood High Street.


Death is seldom dignified,
For as the wave abates,
The body breaks upon the shore,
And scatters all its contents,
As seeds seethed from a willow reed,
Are feathered soft upon the wind,
Then drift and tumble drunkenly to earth,
Or as fiery stones from space,
Scatter scarlet sparks,
In their wake upon the world,
The husk must reveal all of its secrets,
Before the final journey can begin.




Nature will stake its claim,
Upon the ebbing tide,
But first must come the sacred ceremony,
The rituals of passing,
Where pale beauty and dignity,
Cloaked in solemn robes,
Attend to the infant dead,
And usher them once more,
Across the rushing river of rebirth.


Past The Angel on Strood High Street,
In the cold gild of an October morn,
Came a clattering funeral cortage,
Led by four Belgian Black horses,
Pitch dark as carnauba boot polish,
Coats shiny as parade ground buttons,
Manes that flowed as liquid tar,
Over napes of carved ebony.
Upon their forelocks each wore a panache,
A plume of black ostrich feathers,
Fountains of ink that fluttered,
With each delicate nod of the head.
Bridled and tacked with straps,
Of polished leather and silver buckle,
The trace, girth and breeching,
Harnessed and put to pull the hearse,
Swept as a storm around the corner.


The clip, clop and clatter of their hooves,
Upon the road brought forth a spark,
That like life itself rose, flared and faded,
Then fell anew into nothingness.
Granddad in white flowers was spelt out,
In bunches behind the funeral glass,
Of their hearse of burnished blackwood,
That glittered with silver filigree,
Whose wheels of wood, spoke and felloe,
Turned as travelling suns,
From East to West unceasing.


Whilst in its simple box of oak and brass,
The husk that remains awaits its root,
Its turn to sink into fresh turned soil,
Sliced with boots and shovel blades,
And nestle in its soft nest of earth,
Amidst the dark, dank, embrace of eternity,
Before each soul returns anew to its Otherworld,
where from whence it first arose,
Restoring to its rightful realm,
The life which has fled its limpid limbs,
Which fate had merely sought to borrow.
Now only a ghost lingers in the mind,
Of all those that are left behind,
As memories of moments in scrapbooks,
Are pasted upon a page to be passed on,
For as winter strips the branches bare,
So must each fragile bud of breath,
Fade and fall in its turn, to rest at last,
Ablaze amidst the infinite stars.


Death has precious little dignity,
Except that which we gift the dead,
The corpse is cold and ash grim grey,
So what care the departed for such things,
As rituals and sacred ceremonies.
No, it is we alone who are left care,
Forced to live with our memories,
And bear the burdens of such cares,
We who tie black ribbons on a wreath,
And erect the stone cross to remember,
Who follow the hearse in silence,
Sombre in black suits and ties,
To give honour and dignity to the dead.