British Sunday

Tim Walker

It's a British Sunday: where
outside the window, the sky
is a chunky knit sweater: gray

Of course, it's cold: enough
to bring to mind and taste:
cream tea (two scones, earl grey)
from a shop (currant red awning and
waitresses with Slavic accents)
around the corner from John Keats

And while the scones, more like
buttermilk biscuits with raisins,
were unremarkable, the tea served
on a silver tray was a memory of
some ritual I may have once known

Seeing gray and feeling a slow chill
reminds me of the London I roamed,
with its long slim rows of identical flats,
dimmed and silvered by the skillet sky,
and dark lampposts and dark trees

But it's the wind I remember most,
the wind and the rain from that one
Sunday in the Hampstead tea room:
a neverending, wet cold made colder
(but familiar) by a British gray


Written: 9/14/10