New Poetry - Modernist Magazines Project

10
SUBURB FACTORIES
White as a drawing on white paper
The architect built the tall
Suburb factories,
Compact as a liner admired from the littered beach,
Gaunt like the ward of a hospital.
And when he sunk their roots among
The places of spare trees
The huts and the wastes,
To stare down the polished arterial road,
And to peer across the chimneys,
Made the big concrete mushrooms grow,
Towers with gland-heads ;
He edged to the cliff
The doomed life of the villas ; fastidious streets,
Men signed with their fathers' manual trades,
Their faces curiously primmed and clenched
If perhaps they can leap above the memory
Of those scorned trades.
Stamping, the concrete brushes down their fences,
It brings drilled crowds, small property.
From the diamonded parks I would wish to delight
At shapes that attack and are new :
But it's hard,
Knowing only for certain ; power is here surrendered
And it changes to the hands of the few.
Changes though ; change is the air ; roofscape
Touches some nerve, and the lost
Sinking scream
Of electric trains touches it, and white masonry
Springs up like a fire, but strikes like frost.
BERNARD SPENCER