I bought yours in the soukh in Sharjah, remember,
From a thin shop with stuff right up the stairs:
Daggers, mostly, bits of elephants, and coffee pots.
The owner smelled of cinnamon. Mind you, everything
Was part-cinnamon back then, even the red sand,
Which crept constantly at night into the babies’ cots.
How the damn clock got that far, God alone knows.
Made in Japan, it says, in Nineteen Twenty-Three,
Mostly out of wood, hand-painted tin, and lack of doubt.
But everything was in English: Favourite Watch Co,
Fifteen Years Guarantee. Eighty-six years on,
Still ticks comfortably. They must have turned them out
With Singapore in mind, for planters, smoking concerts,
The Straits Settlements, maybe as far west as Calcutta,
For the leather-faced conquerors, always from colder farms.
Business is business. Belongs in some Waiting Room,
Some dead-end branch line somewhere high: tea growing, mist.
Somehow the old thing made it farther, past the palms,
All the way past the tired pirates, past the shimmering coast,
On, on, to the dusk-glad harbour. Cargo. Oriental provenance.
Some good pieces. But still not this one really after all.
These days, it hangs on a wall four hundred years older,
In England, among snow and rain, fields and ditches.
You could imagine this as home, somewhere to stay.
But really it’s about explaining what happened once,
And about what will happen later on, long beyond
Anything we might guess now. About the hours till it’s day.