That Sunday, we walked through Docklands,
and saw the new era in a forest of cranes;
and thought how much Dickens would have made of it,
a number of empty buildings against an empty sky,
and the ruins of the building site –
loose-piled mounds of earth, and Hiroshima girders
awaiting their marble skins –
(I was naked and shivering in a warm coat of herringbone) –
and the finished buildings with their polished glass
aspiring to the vacancy of heavens.

Much later, on Waterloo Bridge, I remembered
standing at the wharveless edge, looking down
where the river muzzled bits of rubbish on the rising tide
and worried them in dingy pieces as they sank away,
and the breeze blew clouds of grit into our eyes,
so we were forced to flinch, and to cover our eyes.
I knew, by then, whatever has power survives
when the powerless goes to the ground;
and felt the February rain begin falling
on the opening spaces, on the new foundations
for the unbuilt walls of Jerusalem's divide.

Copyright © Michael Ayres, 1994.
taken from Poems 1987-1992 (Odyssey Poets, Nether Stowey, 1994)