Listen to the poem here
Below,
next to our feet,
the present
just about to turn
into the past.
The plastic bottles,
and the beer cans
from last night.
The cigarette butts
impacted in between
the cobble stones
And next to them
the newly sprouted seedlings
thrusting upwards
like minute berserkers
insanely charging
our enormous flattening
human tide
trying to turn
everything back
to forest once again.
Below
the surface
which we tread,
bus tickets not yet
decomposed,
someone’s grandmother’s
favourite brooch,
a pen which wrote so
wonderfully
that there was a person
who still rued its loss
the day they died.
And here and there
lost coins which might have
saved who knows how many lives.
Below,
the years crushed
into millimetres.
Beams, tiles, mortar,
and porcelain and building
stones and bric-
a-brac;
and midden, midden, midden
through metres down to
the ancient centuries
Below,
with the remains of empire:
columns, undiscovered
temples, mosaics and
everywhere that’s else
the ruins of a million
not once remembered lives.
Above,
around my shoes,
the future imminent,
constantly undoing
my oh so carefully
tied laces.
,
Phillip Hill 2018
Sideways Station 