Outside Keats House, Hampstead. A group,
disparate in background and aspect, but for the fact
we are all U3Aers - of a certain age, predominantly
female, trailing behind us years of teaching,
counselling, engineering, law; bound by a common love
of buildings and each other. Keats' House is closed.
This doesn't matter, as we're making pilgrimage
round Modernist constructions: glass, concrete, steel
and plywood feature, nary a mouldering arch,
Shaded o'er by a larch, as Keats would have it.
No nightingale's heard now in Keats' trees,
only the insistent static of the parakeet,
new London soundtrack. What deathless verse
can squawks inspire? Only the hip hop jiggle
of modern rhyme, relentless battering of broken beat.
Oh, Keats, your magic casements lie beyond
the concrete, glass and plywood world
we have constructed. We glimpse you through the bars -
but not regretfully. The parakeet elite, elegant,
immigrant, dexterous, and deft,
lovely as orchids as they shimmer down,
sharp-feathered, snap of paradise.
They are the birds that we deserve now.
And few of us, intrepid modernists,
regret the bargain. The past has flown.
We're facing forward, glad to have been dealt
liveable houses, reconstructed spines,
long aging and long learning, U3A,
no palsy shakes our few, sad, last gray hairs,
and we have glorious agile birds in spandex flocks.