Written, partially, on the walk to work during a recent bus drivers’ strike. Tweeted as a short poem on Friday, refined to this on the Monday. I say refined. Elongated. 

Popped from my shell;
by action struck
out of a self-made bubble.
Forced to walk ancient paths
made modern, by face alone,
and modern roads burned
by history’s glow.

The rain clings,
heavy,
in the city’s roaring deeps,
its whipping tail snatching at us all,
refugees from a land of open vents
and steaming warmth.

And what premonition
took me on time’s bridge?
That small educated guess
to furl my dipping umbrella and
venture gingerly across,
unprotected
against great Thames’s squalling robe of grey.

In rain-slippered shoes,
on slick white metal,
glimpses of the river,
in the time between raindrops.

The dome of Wren, hunched at my back,
the tower of Gilbert-Scott
a colossal finger in the mist,
a cathedral to the rational,
flowered in art.
Its shadow,
dim,
falls across me
and I pass into faceless Southwark.