Come from your big houses,
Orchards and vegetable patches.
Break in with sledge hammers
Of nostalgia, and shovels
Made of cameras and books
And old photographs.
With lungs of pneumatic ozone
Blow the dust from the surface
And prise open four hundred years.
Under the tarmac there's living
And dying, wet shawls and rough cloth
Laid down with the sewerage
In layers. Patient as Lazarus
They wait among fossils and fish bones.
Dig, then, down into the soil,
Into the soul of the earth;
Unstiffen the grubby grave cloths,
Breath life into unearthed nostrils.
Dig, then, your pilgrim routes
Down, down benath the steep streets;
Through the sands; under the sea:
Look up to the barnacled hulls
As they came and went, came and went;
Went and never came again.
Sweep the tears from the rocky shelf;
Lay bare the land to new eyes.
See how the new generations come;
Their socks thick, their boots polished:
Clasping their purses they slum
The carapaces of a dead time
And try on lives that never were.
Sleep in the new-timbered
Antique bedrooms, where the remains
Of old cupboards imagine the day
That the long weekend steeps in.
Swig steep ale at the old Dolphin,
Sing about grog in the bottom bar,
Wey-hey and up she rises
When ships set sail in the good old days,
And the famous hounds of noble men
Resurrect, run, and are forgotten
Again, forever. And then go home.
Heave away those good old days;
Abandon the place with one last sigh.
Say goodbye to draughty floor boards,
Distemper on your jacket sleeves;
Cheerio to the fish-from-the-sea,
Water-from-the-pump, horse-drawn,
Dragging-the-coal-and-wood-uphill,
Candle-lit paradise of big lives
In small rooms you tried on for size,
And almost wished you'd known.
Call at the supermarket on the way home.