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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=460675" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>0205 Front porch days</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">London, six o'clock in June, two-o-o-five: </div><div style="margin:10px 0">These streets were built in nineteen-five or thereabouts<br>in unimaginative grid, on London clay and previous watercress beds<br>by builders and those, quote, 'developers', <br>whose sudden stroke of luck was that the Tube line was diverted<br>and foreshortened, now to pass this way all overground; <br>it took a century, and climate change, to prove<br>that cracked-out summer clay and winter watercourse, <br>and building onto earth, are not the best foundation...<br>but these terraces of modest houses<br>(alternate houses gabled, bayed, to suggest they're twice the size) <br>have stood the test of time, when, often, underpinned; <br>intended for the aspirational working-class, <br>they've now become, these last few years, <br>'first homes' for the equally aspirational middle-class; <br>tonight the streets are nose-to-tail with silent, gleaming<br>four-wheelers looking down their grilles<br>at nifty runabouts - some, I regret to say, <br>parked where suburban front-gardens once declared respectability<br>in token concrete-and-flower three metres square of space<br>as subtly expressive in miniature<br>as any grandly-vista-ed and avenued ducal drive.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">All is very quiet at this hour; doors firmly closed; <br>front gardens are for show just like front parlours were.<br>Across the road, for all I know, <br>(for this is London; one does not often chum across the street) <br>our neighbours may live sunburned Southern lives<br>in long back gardens which face West (ours, East and overshadowed) : <br>while on this side, just one front door is out of line: <br>like some beached whale (or dolphin sounds more cute) <br>providing a double-take but just too late for passing pedestrians, <br>I sit at open door with paperback, in jasmine heaven, <br>which may last - three weeks? but which in this first year of flower, <br>is both a song of praise and Southern holiday; <br>it's lost its first exhilaration, but acquired<br>a subtle maturity so that, one lungful gloried in, <br>one's ready straightway for yet more perfection; <br>a week or so, and its poignant sharp-sour scent<br>will bring back memories of summer's ripe Venetian back-canals.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">This new-found gazebo, to you in Southern climes <br>will be just commonplace - as afternoon front porch, <br>or sociable evening verandah or leisured stoep, <br>where West Indians, for instance, wait to pass the time of day<br>with passing neighbours; for me, exotic new delight; <br>so that I'm quietly proud when the Trinidadians from two doors away<br>take my presence, sitting there, as invitation to pause there at my gate<br>and pass the time of day.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">On one side of the door, vermilion geraniums<br>survived a mildish winter; their colour in this evening sun<br>incredible: blazing colour from one petal, sun-glowed in another; <br>can vermilion really be, as reason and art-teachers say, <br>a mixture of yellow in with red? Not here, today...and so, itself, <br>that you can feel it hit the retina and demand<br>more than the physics of the eye can stand....<br>and then, the other side, the pink geranium<br>sings quite a different song - one hears, but cannot say<br>just where the difference lies in colour's music scale.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Metaphysics, for three thousand years or more<br>in East and West, has held in high debate<br>whether what, like this, the senses' scene, provides<br>may be direct connection with what's called divine; <br>or whether this must be transcended in some mindful way.<br>The answer, here, today, for me is in<br>one glimpse of sunlight through geranium.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Michael+Shepherd">Michael Shepherd</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=460675" data-title="0205 Front porch days de Michael Shepherd" data-description="London, six o'clock in June, two-o-o-five: 

These streets were built in nineteen-five or thereabouts
in unimaginative grid, on London clay and previous watercress beds
by builders and those, quote, 'developers', 
whose sudden stroke of luck was t..."></div>
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