Prospect Villa

Prospect Villa

The house has rarely been as cold as this
since we were here together long ago
the coal fire standing quiet and unlit
as dormant as the rose of Jericho

Mist from dad's paintings leaks into the air
the signs of you recorded everywhere
the scratches on the table, four plain chairs
became the altar of your daily prayers

A love shared out through all the happy years
hides in these walls, I feel it through my skin;
it seeps into my bones and swells the tears
so loaded with the grief I hold within.

But like the rose this place will flower anew
and love will flow and build another home
and other children will remember too
this house where I, in silence, stand alone.

Tim Fellows 2019

Upon Hull

I spent time in Hull when I was a student in 1983, working for what had been the White Fish Authority and had recently become "Seafish". I have been back a few times, but never for very long, often as a rugby referee or with the children for tennis events. I recently went back and had a bit of a drive round, then ran alongside the Humber to where I briefly worked.




Upon Hull

War, raging on the sea,
far from the city,
had shaken its foundations.

I walked the avenues
and breathed the cold air
where gulls cried.

Made phone calls in piss-soaked
white boxes
on the edge of nowhere.

Docks still alive with men,
fish processed on the quays
reeked with an ungodly
and malevolent odour.
Their dead eyes wept.

The diesel-stained train
pulled away from the city
that the poet so waspishly
put down.
The train departed but he stayed.

Across broken bridges the city splits,
each side lapping
from the slick waters.

I drive the twin lanes they built
to speed the traffic through.
No need to stay and look.

But I stay - I spend time, observe
the decaying, graffiti-stained
buildings I once worked.
Shattered glass sparkles.
Scudding clouds
head over bleak flatlands
to the killing grounds.

It parades its pawn shops,
vaping emporia and boarded-up
forgotten nightclubs.
Relentlessly and unapologetically
working class.

Here, where the fish once stank,
a retail heaven of glass and gaud.
The poet may have asked
"Which stinks more?"

Pockets of industrial resistance
break through dereliction
and try to stem the tide.

Grey-blue ebbing river,
choppy under knifing gusts -
the life-blood. Towers
stand in splendid defiance
as sparse traffic crosses its span.

A quick, blood soaked blade
once gutted this city -
flesh decaying,
rancid, spoiled.

I leave it behind once more,
receding in my mirror,
as the day warms
the fractured memories.

Tim Fellows 2019

Image by Andrew Sidebottom from Pixabay