Come, let us go then, you and I,
Through the shadowy backstreets of our minds,
To that old place, those old times.
Let us go to where the cold sea wind,
Ruffles the furrows of the fens. Endless flat fields,
Stretching to a distant horizon.
Let us go back to Boston. That small town
Of no real renown, whose quotidian rhythms
Made the music of our youth.
Each day the Witham’s water crawls away,
To a slither between silt banks, revealing the wrecks
Sunk down into dark brown sludge.
At three thirty, black-blazered boys finish school
Wandering into town, to loiter lazily
Looking for excitement, before heading home.
Against a bruised sky, the Maud Foster Mill,
Glows with its fresh white paint. It’s big wood sails
Slowing looping round and round.
And at night the townies take their cars,
To rev them round the market place, going nowhere,
Bass throbbing like a hardened heart.
The slate coloured stone of the Stump’s great tower
Stretches upward, a proud and silent shepherd,
Watching over this fledgling flock.
The red bricked rows of terraced houses,
Holding homely little lives, people who, long ago
Forgot their dreams and desires.
Sometimes we feared that this stagnation,
Would seep into our souls, weigh our wings down
And stop us from soaring.
Yet still we loved this town, backdrop of our youth,
That carries within its tough, tangled strands,
A special kind of truth.