Poetry: London by Tamara von Werthern
London
I glide through empty streets
And see your beauty and I realise
That for all these years, you’ve never slept
Until now, and this moment of repose
Makes my love burn fiercer
I want to slide my fingers
Along balustrades and cornices
Tracing your features
I store away how peaceful you look
How honest and exposed and vulnerable
I need to remember this moment
For when you’re awake again
Thrumming with life and colour
Alive with nights out clubbing
And sick in every corner, fumigated
People crammed onto buses
All that life being lived parallel
And at criss-crossing angles, the breathlessness
Of you, the all-containing, thrilling
And terrifying aliveness of you.
I will take it out then and look at it again
Dream of your cornices and that moment
When you were mine and mine alone
Stretched out under a spotless sky.
Tamara von Werthern is an award-winning playwright based in Hackney.
You can read more about the success of her dystopian short film, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, here.
Her play The White Bike, and climate change book Letters to the Earth, featuring her contribution, are available at Pages of Hackney bookshop on Lower Clapton Road, which is currently closed but still selling book tokens.