NaPoWriMo Day 16: Silver birches

 
Day 16 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today, try writing a poem that imposes a particular song on a place. Describe the interaction between the place and the music using references to a plant and, if possible, incorporate a quotation – bonus points for using a piece of everyday, overheard language.
 
 
Silver birches
 
It’s so steely silent you’d think it frozen
in a game of Musical Statues, giggles muted,
joined by its spindly fellow men, stood stiffly tall.
Its arms stretch up tweaking fingers, creaking light
intermittently in the gathering wind that’s building,
leaves shaken, a head of hair gradually awakened.
 
Behind, the mud-coloured brick walls tower
towards the cloudless sky, home to the liquid chirp
of swallows pecking at the speckled clay,
the solo chimney no longer pushing up black spirals
of gritty smoke, panels of glass reflecting the sun.
 
We pass through this sweeping line of zebra trunks,
trace our fingertips along the loosening rough bark,
stretch back our necks to pursue their reach,
their splendour. At night, tiny lights link a shine
between them, add a twinkle to their dazzle,
create a faery path to twist and curve down.
The gravel crunches beneath our eager feet.
 
A theatre of art breathes inside the great doors
of the Bankside power station. The turbine hall
pulls us in like the bowels of a great whale,
the old boiler room no longer pumping loudly
but housing quiet galleries of paintings and sculptures.
 
From 1891, the station supplied the city’s electricity,
cracking and blinking, and waking the arc lamp
streetlights along Queen Victoria Street in the smog
that curled and crept around every sleeping house.
It kept all the metal presses printing along Fleet Street,
where the workers rose at the crack of dawn to shout
the exuberant headlines of the morning papers.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 17, 2025