Sky gaze of the Cinema’s shoal

Whale clouds are sea deep in the light that is leaving,

Silence passing, they breach the blind ordinary street,

Rise above the wires and watch fading petticoat girls

Return home from the evening show of an empire.

Easy now, the shoals move down the street,

Languid, the liquid thickens the scene,

Quiet, the lost giant sets their dreams,

Of lipstick 50’s, rerun from the velveteen.

Seats creak and knock your calves,

Carpet smells stale, sticks to your feet,

The cockerel crows and the Pathé unreels

Black and white tales onto a smoky screen.

Small, brown and spectacled he steps from the frame,

Down a gang plank; wind souls rush to the street,

The camera rises through the coal tar sky,

To an immense gaze of an ancestral sigh.

Shoals in the shallows are too small to notice,

The life unthought above their drifting streets,

Stiffens them a step from understanding,

That what they were had not always been.