LONDON JUNE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 11756, 21 July 1916, Page 4

LONDON JUNE.

Rank odours ride on every breeze; Skyward a hundred towers loom; _ And factories throb and workships wheeze, And children pine in secret doom. To squabbling birds the roofs declaim Their little tale of misery; And, smiling over murk and shame, A wild rose blows by Bermondsey. Where every traffic-ridden street Is ribboned o'er with shade and shine, And webbed with wire and choked with heat; Where smokes with fouler smokes entwine; And where, at evening, darkling lanes Fume with a sickly ribaldry— Above the squalors and the pains, A wild rose blooms by Bermondsey. Somewhere beneath a nest of tiles My little garret window squats, Staring across the cruel miles, And wondering of kindlier spots. An organ, just across the way, Sobs out its ragtime melody; But in my heart it seems to play; A Wild Rose blows by Bermondsey 1 And dreams of happy morning hills And woodlands, laced with greenest boughs Are mine to-day amid the ills Of Tooley Street and wharfside sloughs. Tho' Cherry Gardens reek and roar, And engines gasp their horrid glee; I mark their ugliness no more: A wild rose blows by; Bermondsey. —Thomas Burke. (From " Nights in London," published by Henry Holt and Co.)