William Oxley


A STAB AT CHELSEA

The light of Old Chelsea is of the mind:
a dim river light that glinters,
slicks past Cheyne Walk's brief garden.
A light that offers and deters

like the ghost of Sir Thomas More
forever haunting shabby purlieus
of Utopia.

Borough of oddity and poetry,
science too (that progress in wealth and slavery)
for grown in its own Physic Garden
it sent the cotton seed to America.

 

Copyright © Poets of London