Under Construction

Photo credits: Lucy Oldfield

I watched them take photographs of the gutted factory

Pocketing the past, hoping for history

The students laughed as the cameras closed

Like the eye of Time on a length of rope

For the smoke and flash

Were distant embers

They spoke in subdued whispers, one smoked

The other two pretended

-          This was growing up.

With a cigarette bent between two fingers

He felt like a God, it was how one attempted

To trace the steps

               In the crumbling Wall

And his fingers pressed to the seams in the brickwork

Which told of man’s engineering,

Now the art of the fall.