Bridge: Waterloo
Title: The Bridge of Time and Treasure
Writer: John Simmons
Creative partners: Johannes Grimond, Tiffany Fenner, Harry Pearce at Pentagram
The work: Item 1 – 200 x 1900 mm, screenprinted on Black Valchromat MDF in style of a river gauge, for wall-mounting. Item 2 – screenprinted scroll, white type on Sirio Ultra black paper, 122 x 925 packaged in black tube.
Description: Dark Angels sonnet (poem in 14 short stanzas) recalling the writer’s family connections with Waterloo Bridge/locality from his childhood and youth. Beatifully screenprinted in white type on black.
THE BRIDGE OF TIME AND TREASURE
John Simmons
A Dark Angels sonnet
1
Where Terry meets Julie,
Stamp met Christie,
sealed for all time in the sixties.
And they were in paradise.
2
My nans lived just northward,
off Drury Lane where I headed to school.
From there you could have seen Waterloo
if it wasn’t for the houses in between.
Nan told treasured memories
of her Victorian childhood scene,
catching the ha’penny bumper,
going ‘over the water’,
the south a foreign country,
they did things differently there.
And they still do.
3
Here is Waterloo.
My first Eurostar to Paris
here flew along earth-bound
tracks, under the water.
Here flowed the murky Thames
that Monet’s alchemy turned to gold.
4
At night,
after stage limelight,
the river turns liquid silver.
5
See theatre now as the suspension of time
not disbelief. For then and all my prime
the Incan god with the golden body
glistened briefly on that stage
and forever in my memory.
Robert Stephens the only Atahualpa,
clicking to the beat of his own time.
6
Come here any moment
of day and night,
the scene still the same,
different yet right.
Time plays tricks
with hindsight,
time the magician.
7
One winter afternoon we’re walking
over Waterloo Bridge with Aimee and Ada.
A bridge transports to this other world,
where Peter Pan fights the pirate
greedy for treasure, pursued by
a ticking clock in a croc. And how
he flew through heavens above
and how Ada whispered aloud
in wonder “I wish I could fly”.
8
From the bridge he sees
the City’s golden mile,
the dome of St Paul’s
amid towers piled high
from a buffet tray named
after pickle and cheese.
9
Once I stood in gloom of darkness
a gold museum far, far from here,
a room undimming its lights until
I felt bathed in gilded brightness
remembering the Incan.
10
Another time, on this side of the world’s coin,
I watch at dawn with the sun rising
and things, we sing, can only get better,
or so we believe in a moment of magic.
11
On China’s Great Wall we shivered
as the new millennium slithered
ahead like a snake.
And next dawning,
on a live screen that evening-morning,
fireworks sparkled above the night-time water
and we felt the yawning absence of home.
12
In St. Mary’s, called the Jewel in the Strand,
my nan would seek Sunday comfort
in the poor woman’s charity
of a brown envelope note.
And midweek, with my class
from school, we snaked here
to say prayers for a better world,
raised higher by incense to the gods.
13
Down by the Thames, mudlarks
sift sand for gold, finding only plastic,
coinage of another kind.
Here Jessie stepped between,
taking pictures, finding lost shoes,
imagining the stories left behind.
14
We leave stories behind,
but they never leave us.
They are treasures
over the water,
across the bridge,
and they are in paradise.