Markets

Lewisham remains an obscure slab of London

Both south and east it is preserved

In both poverty and anonymity

But it's market is the sweetest cherry of the crop

 

Greenwich, organic and gentrified

Is pretty and curious but hardly practical

It lives still, in the shadow of the royal palace

And is alien to the mercantile soul of London

 

Catford recedes into the sad squalor

Of the half urban and half suburban

Where even the presence of its giant cat

Cannot evoke the magic of Whittington's city

 

Bromley's market emerges as a glade

Amid the quiet forest of suburbia

Transmuting London's commercial energy

Into the weather proof horror of the mall

 

But here at the nub of Lewisham's life

I sated my new wife's ardour for fresh fruit,

And scoured bright stalls for the vegetables

Which stoked the passions of our love.