Richard Lambert
Biography
Richard lives in Norfolk and works for the NHS. He’s had poems in the Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, and The Rialto. His second collection was The Nameless Places (Arc, 2017) and his first novel, The Wolf Road, for young adult readers, is out in autumn 2020.
The Poem
Leaving the City
Shadows fall away
and the City is exposed
as posture and imposture
while the grey of a misty river,
the blue of a misty sky,
collude with our pretence
that we are suspended
like a magician’s assistant in the air,
but it is only a temporary
levitation, a giddy trick
of rails, this dawn floatation, this slide
between bank and bank,
as we leave the institutional havoc
where no-one is to blame,
certainly not the boys and girls
in white pumps on the trading floor,
polished Oxfords, and thin-laced brogues.
So soon the City leaves us
and we are taken in
by a volley of glimpses –
shop storerooms, an accountant’s office,
a kung-fu hall –
the glazed and the dim
through a patina of grime;
bracketed satellite dishes,
ads for low-paid jobs.
Men in high-viz jackets
stand back to watch us pass,
hands dropped, expressions bored;
we pass a field of cows,
a graffitied bridge, a solitary horse.
The commuter belt arrives
with fences and long gardens,
DIY stores and the little
colourful cars moving to and fro
like tropical fish in a tank
but we are moving faster
through the shoals of trees,
the reefs of gorse. Who knows where
we are aiming, who knows where
we will fall, travelling faster
through a blur of cuttings,
a landscaped golf course, but longing
for the sea and its beginning.