GREENOCK circa 1875

When the silky white gauze
Of eddying fogs
And the teeming downpours
Of colourless rain
Were coincidentally absent,
And there were silent shafts
Of feeble sunlight filtering
Through the capacious clouds,
Then the bluish green of the pitching hills

Above the yawning glens,
And the grey swells of the firth
That slapped the bows of merchant vessels,
Were pleasant enough to enchant
First-time travellers
Among the thousands of seamen
Who crewed the hundreds of ships
That sought the dozens of wharves
Fronting the town.
Had they journeyed
During epochs preceding
The nineteenth century,
They might have been further charmed
By the sight of fishing villages
And the frayed sails and weathered boats
Of earnest seekers of maritime staples.
Now, tucked into mellow folds
In a patch of earth that was abutted
By the uplands to the south
And the waters to the north,
There were refineries that spewed
The sickly bouquet of burning sugar,
Textile factories from which listless columns
Of steam rose skyward,
And squalid tenements where life was hard,
Hearts were habitually broken
By the hammers of poverty,
And people frequently prayed
To an old deity
For the consolations of another life.
On the shoreline,
Beside the chaotic array of docks
And the impressive façade of the customs house,
There were shipyards,
In which the technological marvels
Of their day were constructed.
West of the town centre were neighbourhoods
Where the money of commerce
Had found opulent homes,
Cohabiting snugly
With the oblivious recipients
Of fortuitous inheritances
And the shrewd entrepreneurs
Of revolutions inspired
By the new gods
Of mechanised industry.

The photograph shows Greenock's Custom House Quay in 1878.

ISCARIOT

Recalled at last to my profession,
My true calling,
Scornfully sacrificed to avarice,
I found myself
Transported to the place of peace,
That jewel in a coastline
Supposedly free of cold and horrors,
A port of call, a lionised entrepot
For slave traders and explorers
And the rest of empire's captives, now released.

It was all but unrecognisable, a shining urban shock,
Transformed by new winds of conquest,
Tornadoes and hurricanes that no one can block,
The storms of hordes that respect no borders.
Like the old world, it was a maze of congestions,
Answers incapable of asking the right questions,
Amidst thoughtless betrayals by expertly misinformed teachers.
Streets blistered where flowers had rambled,
Shadows of architecture's follies lapped at the beaches,
And diesel fumes fouled paths where pedestrians once ambled.

The colonial house of my irreverent and forgetful bloom
Had long ago been acquired by a criminal of commerce;
But it was a short walk from work to my sorry studio room,
Furnished with rejects from Bunnings, KMart and worse.
When I arrived, home was perched above a sports ground,
Its grandstands sculptured by their floodlit surround.
There, athletic lads waited, wearing the lolly greens of the capital's teams,
Impatient for the coming contest, too young to sense the treachery of dreams.