By Lambeth Bridge

by John Stocks

It was a strange death
Watching the ebb and flow
Of the swollen, seething Thames.
Hour on hour of brooding silence
Half daydreaming past intimacies
Beneath the river’s skin
Velvet blackness.

Then death, fashionable, indiscrete
Emerged, a tryst as evening
Smothered the dying light of sun
On parliament stone.
And her blood stalled
With the rising moon.

Why?
This ceaseless immersion
In great tidal rivers
Water and blood
Inexplicable
Like measuring shadows
Of bats that break at dusk.