South

[Amittai]

S O U T H

(An anecdote from Third Rail "Country".)

Cluck!
Battered wings, a lost dream in the night
On the High Road.
Ah, here's my bus.

(Comment by poet: I promise you, I have NEVER EVER been in Balham on Wednesday mornings. All resemblance - except the bus and the dreams - is purely fictional.)

 

[Albion]

Interesting. South is the title of the book by Sir Ernest Shackleton that deals with his adventures in the Antarctic.

 

[Amittai]

I suppose I envisaged it was average English weather!

 

[crossnote]

Where in the world is Balham on Wednesday? Surely not in the Kosher side of Borough Park.

 

[Amittai]

Sorry, it's in south London, where the trains are powered from a third rail, and has a High Road, and I envisaged squashed takeaway chicken from the previous night. I didn't in fact live there.

It's just allusive, with a play on poetic emotion and a sort of loosely modified haiku structure.

Once one has internalised a handful of things and "sat on them" half a lifetime, it probably becomes easier to come up with such (in my case mediocre) efforts in later life at lengthy and random intervals

It just came to me, within minutes. I didn't see the need to incorporate it into something bigger. An afterthought was a vaguely surprising parenthesis in my comment.