Poor Richard
dear kanga
Leave Report
Sabbatical • Departure • Arrival • Elgin Crescent • A Shot of the British Museum • At the Victoria and Albert • The Book of Kells • At Kew • Through Pisa • Return to Iffley • Mordros
Source: Poor Richard: Poems. Wellington: Port Nicholson Press, 1982
Electronic source: Poor Richard: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
At Kew
The trumpet creeper ‘hath
no property at all
apt for the use of man’
sic more or less at Kew
in the Queen's garden
where it throws clusters
of swelling tubular
red-gold open mouths
braying to heaven:
a property most apt
for man's well-being as
a steady stream of jets
rising from Heathrow
tears the place apart.