The long Bristol Road opens up before me like an exotic river,
one that as a child was out of bounds to the
future Oxfordshire estuary Selly Park boy,
living in the tributary that fed the equally
impressive cod feeding grounds of the Pershore Road mainstem
and yet one that became enticingly familiar
as I encroached down the affluence felt of Tiverton Road to go swimming,
or take up the football cause on the open space
of the wild and hauntingly beautiful ‘rec, daring myself
to venture into this other land plagued by family members
to whom would become important in my story.
Against the tide, rushing from the ocean, the hot
chocking tide of metal grinds
against the sharks with papers in hands
and the smell of blood from the now forgotten
Selly Oak hospitable where I first learned the care
of schools of nurses concerned for my ankle,
used as bait by metal studded boots,
this tide, ebbing away into the smaller streams and fish ponds
was an oasis of possibility that stout Kingfisher Auden could not
have cast his net in.
As I stream past haunts on the bus, the houses of friends
I had swam with, the other entrance to the Pebble Mill,
skipped several times across a placid half drunk
foamy beer washing upon the marsh land of tonsils,
the long loved cove of The Gun Barrels and further inland
the affectionate arms of doting Country Girl
who more than offered me shelter when cold and damp
in my small becalmed breached bedsit in Heeley Road
courting my woes
and scaling the wars of three pounds an hour,
never realising that at one time several streets away Poor
Uncle Stan, a casualty of innocence of an altogether
different war rocked and remembered Belsen.
I get off the 63 bus, a route taken by my granddad for many years
as he drove with past Canadian zeal the clubs
that adorned the Bristol Road in his Tram,
and stare down Weoley Park Road,
the tsunami of interest welling up
as the prospect of seeing the dead sea
floating with stone and no more suffering ,
land’s end,
beyond the sirens cry
and the smoke of a generation
lifts itself towards forever.
Ian D. Hall 2015