Samuel Prince

A Dawn Wander in Modern Living

Peculiar, the sensation of standing
mid-development, mid-gestation,
with so much smacking of dereliction or desertion:
empty diggers, their clawed buckets left forked in the minced earth,
dumper trucks with their beds tilted, pouring air,
near-buried safety guides, obscured hazard signs,
diagrams of timber and gable roofs, screwed to scaffolding.

Sleepless and pestered by tides of thought
I couldn’t outrun, I walked
in the poignancy of first light,
past lethargic mallards in the furrows,
the gleam of late April dew tantamount
to a thousand bike reflectors dispersed on the fields. 

A cure for wakefulness: trespass in someone’s grand design,
snoop around the new housing estate site,
from blueprint to artist impression, to its current fruition,
through the paneled fencing, onto its inchoate streets, closes and plots,
as keen as a carrion bird or warzone dog, I lurked among foundations,
the tangerine muck trenches and tread tracks. 

One day, this anatomy of community will be future sanctuary,
a redbrick somewhere pined for in alien places,
with windows double-paned to withstand
nocturnal knuckles, insulate private delusions,
but for now, all shrouded in polythene
except a single skylight, gasped ajar, as an overlook
on these pains of creation,
tomorrow’s homes
where the magnolia walls dissemble, and inch ever-inward.

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Samuel Prince’s debut collection, Ulterior Atmospheres, was published by Live Canon in 2020. Recent poems have appeared in The Alchemy Spoon and Pedestal. He lives in Norfolk, UK.