Against The Tide.

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