Oxford Road by Moonlight
© Rommi Smith, BBC Artist in Residence for the Commonwealth Games 2002

Written after walking home from the Literatures of the Commonwealth Final event at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. First performed on Mike Shaft's Breakfast Show Monday 24th June 2002.

Listen to Rommi perform this poem

Here, in this poignant darkness
You can glimpse the utterance of
A prayer, a whispered verb that causes
Urgency to stop and pause and catch its breath;
The flutter of paper wishes, hanging in this air

He speaks a painting
Reads the river of his poem
Trusts we know the depth at which to swim
Before the current turns to tide
And oceans begin forming
The silver belly of this pregnant moon
Bridging the divide

It's spotlight catches
The poetry of her paper
Casts its impression across
The landscape of her glasses
This great escapade, this dual language
Of what is known
And what is forecast

The future is a stage
And he reads his words as if discovery
Had entered from some distant place and
Hailed itself the namesake of his face
Before the mirror called its visitor a journey

Out here, on this kerb, we sit
Contemplating explorers of Ireland and India
Huddersfield and Manchester
Walking, for all the world
As if the photos of each and every person
Was in their pockets

Here, we grasp an urban promise
Written in the concrete skyline
And the search for a pathway
Is in no bright star

But the fact that it is
Better to travel to the land of
Somewhere, something
Than the one of
Never knowing