But the end of it all was a shuffling line of ten thousand
Stretched out at the airport, everyone in search
Of a difference not too discomposing:
A compatible sort of bathing, docile fauna
Trotting up to nuzzle on the hotel steps,
A wheel of chance where every player wins . . .
'And when we were there it felt easy to be there,
And now we are back it feels truthful to say
"I don't feel I'm back" or "I don't feel I ever went",
The place was an illusion. We were not illusions ourselves,
We made the links between what you call "different" places,
Which are more the same because we have left our impression,
Which modifies the place as one wave modifies a beach,
Or, "like" another English changes your own.
We sit with the arm of our traveller's tale extended,
Reciting the fictions of distance, we tip our bags
And find the fool's gold of unchangeable coins,
The centimes, the bani, and here in the bottom
An unused token for a locker in Central Station,
We'll use it next time. And the children are amazed,
The boys want to go when they are adults, or when they have passports,
They have sat long enough being just themselves
On this side of the sea, can't they be on the other side as well?
"Look at this!" they would like to say, holding up
The plunders of the gift shop. "You see, you see!
It proves we have been there and thought of you.
We weren't alarmed by the difference at all.
It was so immense we have brought back part of it
To be found nowhere else but there (and Victoria Station):
A Duty Free ballpoint pen with a toucan's head!"'
What one boy thought and wrote in the room beyond
The gift shop and the green channel was
A distant recollection, of himself. All his words
Lay silent in the books, the forests continued
To grow without him, and the plundered chests of coins
Closed their lids as if he had never brought any back.
The wheel had turned and turned and stopped there.
Her had gone no farther than his heart had sent him
On its regular missions of circulation.
Alan Brownjohn
The Old Flea-Pit (1987)
THE BOYHOOD OF RALEIGH
Entranced his listens to salty tales
Of derring-do and giant whales,
Uncharted seas and Spanish gold,
Tempests raging, pirates bold.
And his friend? 'God I'm bored.
As for Jolly Jack, I don't believe a word.
What a way to spend the afternoons,
The stink of fish, and those ghastly pantaloons!'
Roger McGough
.
