"Strong Currents, Deep Water"

During my years in London I used to walk along the river bank from Kingston Upon Thames to Richmond - you  could convince yourself it was semi-rural. There was a sign on a slightly skewiff post planted just off the river bank, "Strong Currents, Deep Water." I made a note and put it in my jacket pocket where it lay forgotten for years until, disposing of the jacket, I finally found it. Hence this poem.

   An early poem along the same half-light, half-serious lines of a disabused man ruefully reflecting was "February 1981," written in the same month and year of the title and posted here on 16 February 2012. A more recent poem is "Well Met in Dorking," written in August 2013 and posted here on 18 July 2015.

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There’s barely a day without its fight,
   The bills backed up, the children foul,
Reproaches hurtling left and right,
   The woman scornful like a big-eyed owl;
Oh marriage, commitments, are all very well
But they light up a path to a freezing hell,
Where two are pinioned flank to flank
      And shackled with bricks and mortar:
   I know a sign on the river bank –
      “Strong currents. Deep water.”

And workplace assessments are soul-damning trash,
   “Yes-ing” and “no-ing” in a conference call,
Make a poor showing and your job’s gone smash,
   Future and pension thrown to the wall;
The Director of Colleagues was coolly phlegmatic,
More Mephistopheles than wisely Socratic,
He was permed, silk-suited and suavely swank,
      But his nod sent lambs to slaughter:
   I know a sign on the river bank –
      “Strong currents. Deep water.”

Oh, at night when the sky is black as a cloak
   And the bedclothes dank with fear’s own sweat,
I tug and tear at this cosmic joke,
   Finding mere molecules clumped and ill-met;
What justifies, confides a meaning,
To the human animal coiled and keening?
Will the solar wind, unconscious, blank,
      Scatter us, quarter to quarter?
   I know a sign on the river bank –
      “Strong currents. Deep water.”

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© June 2020