Halcyon

 
By the gas works and the giant Sainsbury’s

blocking the winter sky like a shroud

the boxed hatchbacks swarm like larvae.

Though smothered, she was not dead

she was merely exiled beneath the ground –

sleeping fields that have never seen a lark

acres of concrete spreading like a wound.

She springs from the earth near the car park.

For an age, she waited, like a rumour.

Glimpsed in the flash of a kingfisher

she is the queen of  hawthorn and alder

the goddess – here, you can almost touch her.

She threads through ash and willow weeping.

She was not dead. She was merely sleeping.

Photo shows the subject of this poem, the River Pool in Lewisham. Went to buy a telly, wrote a poem - well, not immediately. London has many rivers as well as the Thames  (eg the Fleet, the Wandle, the Effra, the Ravensbourne, the Pool, the Quaggy) - rivers that are recorded in the Domesday book and were known by the Romans and Saxons and before. Often they are buried in culverts and used as storm drains but in some cases, as here, they are allowed to resurface.