I had a fabulous day in London yesterday, offering pre-event support to my friend, Crysse Morrison who gave a wonderful hour of poetry from the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square from 4.00 to 5.00 pm. She has her own regular blog, so click here for her own account of the event.(Scroll down to Sunday, July 19th 09)

Now it’s Sunday again, and while I was browsing through my file of fairly recent work, wondering which poem to post as my Poem of the Week, I came across this one, which was set in a hotel not very far from where I was yesterday:

In the Garden of the Goring Hotel

Thickets of laurel and rhododendron cushion the wall
lulling the background of car horns and engines
almost to silence, until a sudden hiss of exhalation –
a bus, maybe, pulling away from the grimy kerb
dropping young travellers from Poland or Estonia
to pan for gold. In the shrubbery, a five-year old
plays among the twigs and beetle tracks. The scent
of box-leaves hasn’t altered, all these years; dark-red
pansies, yellow ones and indigo, display the same face.
Moss has homed in on the cracks in the crazy paving
that leads to the dark fence and the tall pines.
On the edge of this echo of forest, a running girl
almost breaks free from the dappled shade.
The bronze sole of her bronze foot holds her still.

I wrote the first of several versions of this poem in May 08, after staying in this friendly and luxurious hotel for a couple of days, thanks to the generosity of Clarissa, my best friend from school days (scroll down to the 2nd paragraph of this post)for the story of how we met.

Being unaccustomed to staying in any hotel, let alone an upmarket one in central London, a mere stone’s throw from Victoria Station, I was fascinated by the contrasts, not only between the oasis of calm in the beautiful, enclosed garden, and my occasional awareness of the noisy streets beyond the high walls, but also between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of this city.

The strongest memory that I took from that visit, was the image of the beautiful bronze girl, held in perpetual motion under the trees.

As usual, I tried to cram too many details of thoughts, sights and sounds into the poem. When I was on a poetry writing course in Crete in June 08, run by Mimi Khalvati she unerringly focussed on what was, in fact, the real heart of the poem.

This final version has now been reduced from 20-something to 14 lines which seem to have shaped themselves into a sonnet and I’m much happier with it as a result. (Thank you, Mimi!)