A Town Unlike Alice
OVERTURE
Only the bees are busy in this derelict industrial estate.
The myriad black strings are dead of electricity,
and although there is asphalt beneath the thick deposit of blackberries,
this is a factory waste land, hot under the sun and silent.
Cathy pushes home her specs against her eyes
with sticky fingers. Her hands are red as a Moslem bride's,
and a humankindness of blackberries
distends her plastic bag, an art of black ripeness.
Cathy is the one creature moving in this wilderness,
and she would like to be kind, and be shown kindness
for her interesting hoard of blackberries,
her art is so black, so heavy it swings in her bag, it smells of hot rot.
Suppose she offered free fruit but people rejected
so many pounds of beauty and red juice? Or jeered?
Would offering it be being eccentric, a nuisance?
Being lonely, Cathy doubts herself, and cries a little into her blackberries.
Her harvest represents
darkness behind broken windows, sun squeezed between sagging wires:
she looks round, they purge her of self doubt as if they say:
“Don't worry, people can think what they like. It is time to go home.”