Just as the Greeks would bathe naked,
these descending and ascending
(genteel as Burne-Jones’s nymphs on a spiral stair)
are accoutered in light linens,
porting and wheeling travel bags
of rendered cow-skin
as the lift scrolls their platform number.
We are not built to weather
the thousand shocks
against the retina of people-watching –
each tick of the road registering
in clicky knee-joints, restless elbows.
After a while, it is hard to weigh
one approach as superior to another:
those who pull another into a run;
those of any seventh age;
those who carry a foldable bike.
Sat purposive before the glass,
Amber Famdon – her blue and white
Harry Kane shirt, forgotten
on the 18.03 to Paddington.
Matt Bryden is a poet and teacher living in Somerset. He won the Charroux Memoir Prize and the William Soutar Prize in 2019 and in 2018 received a Literature Matters award from the Royal Society of Literature. He has published a pamphlet Night Porter (Templar), a first collection Boxing the Compass (Templar) and a book of translation The Desire to Sing after Sunset (Showwe). He runs the Somerset Young Poets competition. www.mattbryden.co.uk
More work by Matt Bryden
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