From Battersea to Bermondsey, I once paddled through choppy water,
struggled to hold true, until an ebb tide caught my stern
and swept me along on the murky rush of history.
Under fine bridges where waters rage and surge,
to emerge in sight of cathedrals, grand places and palaces,
monuments to our Rich, to a vainglorious past.
On to where this river churns in the wake of tourist craft,
Visitors dazzled by a splendid imperialist epitaph.

These visitors do not see, as I did, the starveling mudlarks,
ragged, the colour of the foreshore itself.
Scavengers of coal and old rope,
salvaged from this soup of detritus and shit.
They search out of hope, finding disappointment in,
the tooth of a woolly mammoth or a Roman nit comb,
a pilgrim’s pewter medal or a sliver of Tudor glass.
It’s all here, in this rush of Britain’s past.

Nor do they hear the rhythms that held us true.
The songs and shanties of wherrymen, lightermen and sailors?
or the marching songs of the phossy-jawed Match girls
drifting downstream to the Ford machinists at Dagenham,
or the voices of the striking dockers, in need,
of wages enough to feed and clothe their families.
Now but whispers in unfashionable winds that blow
through glassy towers on the banks of this great flow.