#1558 - the gone street

 

1558

5.97

6.iv.24

the gone street

ekphrastic for Sidney Long’s 1901 ‘Clyde Street’

 

last sheets to come in from the line

 

rickety, potholed

shadows cast

 

one imagines the procession of painters

photographers

they follow a disinfectant trail

and policemen

 

before the plague there’d been

the smallpox

natives gone

 

Clyde Street –

part of the town that died

 

it is a wind chipped sandstone world

blocks hauled by lash

 

street as absent as it began

 

timber ships of another century visit

 

street ending in the sea whence

playing Beaty Bow

 

a ghost behind the easel

ghosts all watching now