In the Novel Café, Ocean Park Boulevard
We were looking at the highway to China,
And the mountains in the sky
Were threatening storms
That passed in the spring winds.
Downtown would soon be dark.
On the boardwalk came the blues
Of an ageing man whose feelings
Were ancestral pain
The ocean will not wash away.
Better to sing than to die.
These things we see by chance,
Like city lights celestial in the rain,
Or something overheard about Idaho,
And snow falls out of season.
Then there is the history of corn:
Reading how the Ancients of America
Found in the wild the saving grace
Of what became corn.
Buttered lightly, it beckons
A continent to consume.
We see Aztecs and ox-wagons,
Empires and pioneers,
Feasting on corn.
A history of the Americas
Here is served every day.
Geoffrey Heptonstall is a poetry reviewer with The London Magazine. Recent creative work includes poetry for Dead Ink, The English Chicago Review, International Literary Quarterly, London Grip, Message in a Bottle, The Passionate Transitory, The Recusant and two anthologies, Connections and Underground. There is recent fiction for Open Wide, Vintage Script and Writers’ Hub. New essays for Cerise Press and New Linear Perspectives are published this year. Geoffrey’s recent theatre writing includes a play, Providence, published in The Lampeter Review.