Poor Old Tree

When you planted me so long ago at the side of the track
Did you know I would outlive you?
Did you countenance the life that I would give
Not just to self replicate but in harbouring others?
From insects small to tawny owl nesting in my hollow.
Did you contemplate the years of shade
That I would afford travellers down this lane
From farm boy labourers to coaches drawn
And then to cranking cars and back to men?
Did you know that centuries later your ancestors
Would stand beneath me and wonder at my age
Drinking in the air that I expire and admire me
Almost as a generous god?
For the peace and the calm and the life I can give.

You would be sad to see how the world
Is treated with disdain
Your progeny, no longer guardians
But ravagers of nature
Greedy for expansion.
I weep and yearly drop my limbs,
Shrinking from the world at large
Drawing in on myself: to nothing.

Then drunk in their own excesses
They will choke on their own vomit
And there will be nothing you nor I can do.

Poem and photo copyright Englepip©

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London (architecture old and new)

I scan the horizon and wonder

Which building will today

Dominate the skyline.

Vying for height, shape and spectacle

They rise, in London, to the sky:

Above the smog.

2003, The Gherkin: rocket or vegetable?

Love it or hate it: amusing cuteness.

2014, Walkie Talkie leaning tower,  

Sky garden overhang

TV screening a view of the rest.

But 2012 was The Shard.

Aloof, a proud spike: icicle upended.

Taller than the rest.

Should we revere these pinnacles of modernity? 

In a world moving onwards and definitely upwards.

Or look back to Wren, St Paul’s sublime dome

From the east obliterated now by steel and glass.

 

Should we recreate the romance of the past

Shakespeare’s and Wanamaker’s Globe

Reliving nightly the fifteenth century

In the twenty first?

 

 

Defend, promote, revive,

Preserve, destroy, reuse?

Infil, demolish, redesign.

 

 

Architecture:

A spirit of each age.

What will it bring tomorrow?

 

Photos and wording copyright Englepip©

 

via Daily Prompt: Dominant

Daily Prompt: Old versus New

I used to prefer the old to the new

Classics over modernists

St Paul’s to the Shard.

I used to believe

Things should stay as they were

We should never move on

That change should be barred.

But then now became past

And your love slipped away

I  knew that you’d changed

And that I could not stay.

So now I look at the world

Through different eyes

New is the preference

I tend to prioritise.

For the world’s ever changing

What’s gone can’t return

A new future is beckoning

From the past I have learned.

 

Photo of the South Bank of the River Thames, London, showing the modern architecture, including the Thames. Poem and photo Copyright Englepip ©

 

via Daily Prompt: Prefer