Ragged Claws

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Folkestone, Kent, CT20

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

From TS Eliot ’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

The Dream

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed

The Stade, Folkestone, Kent, CT19

Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

Spring Gardens, Coding Street, Vauxhall, Lambeth, SE11

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;

Church of St John-at-Hackney, Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, E5

They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,

Brentford, Middlesex, TW8

They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,

Dawlish, Devon, EX7

And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak

Cleopatra's Needle, Embankment, Westminster, WC2N

Like sibyls of the future; they have power -
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

RAF War Memorial, Embankment, Westminster, WC2N

They make us what we were not -what they will,
And shake us with the vision that’s gone by,

George Blackall Simonds' Maiwand Lion, Forbury Gardens, Reading, Berkshire, RG1

The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?

From Lord Byron’s The Dream (1816)

Folkestone Triennial

And a bewildered glitter of loose road;
Banks of bright growth, with single blades atop

Cornelia Parker's The Folkestone Mermaid, Folkestone, Kent, CT18

Against white sky; and wires a constant chain
That seem to draw the clouds along with them

Joe Grey's Triennial, Folkestone, Kent, CT18

(Things which one stoops against the light to see
Through the low window; shaking by at rest,

Charles Avery's The Sea Monster, The Sassoon Gallery, Folkestone Library, Folkestone, Kent, CT18

Or fierce like water as the swiftness grows);
And, seen through fences or a bridge far off,

Nathan Coley's Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens, Tontine Street, Folkestone, Kent, CT18

Trees that in moving keep their intervals
Still one ‘twixt bar and bar; and then at times

A K Dolven's Out of Tune, Folkestone, Kent, CT18

Long reaches of green level, where one cow,

Paloma Varga Weisz's Rug People, Folkestone, Kent, CT18

Feeding among her fellows that feed on,
Lifts her slow neck, and gazes for the sound.

From Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s London To Folkestone (Half-Past One To Half-Past Five)