Like a book of remembrance
pages - pictures - colour - monochrome
a video of violent action
some better to forget
Dock Road
tarred canvassed boards
pierhead buildings
shacks smell pitch pine
clean like love
Timber washed up on the shore
from a force ten gale
Long passageway
between paint and pop store
harboured spiders black as ice
framed by a tiny window
Grandpa watched their entry
The general office warmed by a cast iron stove
none but foreman, ship owners
captains and engineer-surveyors
lounge here
Quadrant of the general office
a door that always closed
by gravity, silently. A Victorian desk
a chair that moved on castors
with squeak - a slim glass cupboard
containing coin-sized mass-produced
discs wrapped in gold foil
soft to the touch
A mariner's day bunk took
the length of the office
slim mattress, narrow
enough for a child
Dad attending ships berthed
in the sprawl of docklands
He lay on the bunk watching the
kiosk through a mirror
set at a compound angle
He sat in Grandpa’s chair
wrote longhand in blue-black - red ink
Sold chocolate to matelows
Fanta Orange to riveters
condensed milk to girls
in print frocks who smelled of
soap who ruffled his hair and
lingered wanting more than a chat
Sold shag tobacco to pipe smokers
chewing tobacco to silvered men
who operated hydraulic gates
around the tides.
Two hours before and after
the twice a day tide. . . moving back
one hour each day. Their hours rotating
like the endless, restless tide
He lay on Grandpa's bunk, listening to time
tic slow and mellow, yellow with age
Rats beneath stir like those above and keep low
He wondered if they missed
Grandpa of whom he could not remember
He kept the heavy cut-glass ink pot
savoured its ruggedness
set it on his study desk
Grandpa' Shack
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