Poem of the Week: Secret Rivers

Where the river went underground
the convents, breweries and mills
it served went too. In the engravings
we found rag-pickers and herring-girls
fording the current, then carcasses
of rotten tenements, wildernesses
of bricks where the railway came
on its long rush down the hill.
The boy who led me (a boy
like a river may suddenly spring
from the earth) walked the city
for miles, and each time he stopped
at culvert or drain I knew what
he was hearing through the grate.
We walked low walls along the line
his finger traced in the library,
where the map was laid out on the floor.
Coming to the lighthouse
shimmering through the haar
we looked for the current
debouching from a harbour wall –
the river within the river –
where had it gone? So still
we walked in search of that secretive
tide, hearing as we went
only the washerwomen’s songs
on the bleaching green, where
they laid the cloth out to dry.

David Wheatley is the author of Child Ballad (Carcanet), and lives in rural Aberdeenshire.