Poems

Providence

I am a rain that nobody wants.

Even the streets don't understand me.
I am the past perfect tense
 
and deep down inside me are buried
the ghosts of anonymous travellers,
of infamous seadogs and all of the dead.
 
I am a certain word small children fear
and which the poets have forgotten.
I'm Buddha's face in Bamiyan,
 
stolen, sold on from my homeland,
and I am a corpse, knocked down
in Stockwell, ignored by the binmen.