Lawrence Upton

LOOK UP

Brentford

White cloud and grey rain dark move east
side by side as if together
like trains at a large rail interchange;
but here these aren’t separated:
they merge, maybe smash each other.

The grey has shaded down, almost black,
overtaken its companion
of a moment; taken over
that space and quite disappeared,
putting so much weight to the north way

it has left its own space empty
to fill with whitest shiny lumps
with a warm-look blue sky pigeoned
lightly; and there, I hope, one hawk
climbing a thermal stair up to
the roof of a high block of man stuff

LOOK UP

Canvey Island

We’re not quite sure what it is we’re seeing.
It’s a wide area and most of it seems blank,
with some figures in apparent void.
One, overhead, might be a little man,
a minimal upright, a dotless I
under adult supervision; or else
one looks a longer time till making out
greater detail, perception destroying
this illusion of grown up and small child.

What had seemed two entities become many
but much less pictorial and more real;
and around what had been the higher head
a swarm of nonsense chaff comes into sight,
and dazzles it, destroying the semblance
of the constellation that there had been,
now joined and pushed aside by lesser stars
into a multitude. Democratised.

Further East, what looks like giant scorpions
which can, nevertheless, be fragmented.

© Lawrence Upton