Docklands' and Other Poems

Docklands

Those steely skeletons crowd, locked to the sky,
or stoop, heartless, to a foreign border.
  Water's a relief.

We step off-shore, on board, and quickly feel
the sough and thump of waves, a dance-floor
  under our feet,

while girders, derricks, cranes recede in the mist,
container trucks and trains, grain-chutes
  of chaff and meal,

and here and there, anywhere, on the rough dockside
an abandoned warehouse ghosts its rooms - 
  nothing to contain.

From Naples, Leith, Hull - now Gdansk (Westerplatte) - 
this pulling away in the driving rain
  opens a gap
...