Construction is a deeply practical business, but there’s also time for reflection, and perhaps even room for the odd moment of poetry.
To mark National Poetry Day on October 7, we asked CM readers and CIOB members to share their moments of poetic inspiration, either by sending us their own compositions, or nominating a favourite work by an established poet.
And we certainly found evidence that poetry has its place in construction, and vice versa. Kieran Gannon MCIOB gave us the entire history of a project in verse, and poets Angela Topping and Peter Cowlam shared work that takes its inspiration from the built environment.
Peter White ICIOB nominated a beautiful poem by William Ernest Henley, who died in 1903. His Wikipedia entry makes for a fascinating life story.
There are also four more poems to enjoy on the CIOB website. To view, please click here: http://www.ciob.org.uk/news/view/2860
Striking edifice……………
By Kieran Gannon MCIOB
Countless lines gel side by side
A skyscraper perhaps, an Architects stride
Before the Client Chartered Builders confides
A masterpiece in the making? the Surveyors applied
Machinery trundle familiar ground
Terra firma the goal, Engineers boots pound.
The competent workers, in the Irish we found
Turning conversation, specification and numbers around.
“The clock ticks away” the Planners do say
The PM twitching, there will be hell to pay!
With laughter and smiles, cranes dance and sway
A magnificent topping out, crowning the day
A legacy for all in neighbouring backyards
Majestic in stature, an award on the cards
Loggias and atriums, facades and mansards
An explosion of form, new material, postcards?
With keys handed over, the new owners pride
A place to think, work, play, to hide?
And looking back, we took it all in our stride
A striking edifice, to adorn, to reside……….
K Gannon 2010©
I Sing of Bricks
By Angela Topping
Who first
thought of you?
Warm cakes of baked clay
exact corners
strictly rectangular
correct and
all the same
yet each one
slightly different.
Many hands
made you, many others
raised you into walls
to fend off weather.
Sunlight loves you
and shows off
your masculine charms.
Rain decorates you
bringing out the greys and reds.
Victorians loved
playing with you
embroidering houses
with elegant stitchery in earth tones.
How willingly
you align yourselves
clinging to mortar.
Your conversation,
always consonantal.
In deep clunks and scrapes
you engage with the previous courses.
Clubby and solid
as earth
you prop up our defences,
rise to roves
reusable.
You plunge into eaerth
making no moan.
Supporting your fellows
is your delight.
Little loaves
you make up the smallest
pig house, the grandest manor,
humble, strong, biddable
servants, solid as hearth and home.
http://angelatopping.wordpress.com
Planar City
See, in the shadows
of a New York street,
a man who wears
a slanted hat
and saunters from a paper stand,
who in a morning trance
has read the news
of undeclared relationships
that someone’s found
between the geometry
of old apartment blocks
and intersecting
avenues and streets.
Peter Cowlam (not a CIOB member)
Margaritae Sorori
A late lark twitters from the quiet skies:
And from the west,
Where the sun, his day’s work ended,
Lingers as in content,
There falls on the old, gray city
An influence luminous and serene,
A shining peace.
The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night–
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.
So be my passing!
My task accomplish’d and the long day done,
My wages taken, and in my heart
Some late lark singing,
Let me be gather’d to the quiet west,
The sundown splendid and serene,
Death.
