COLLAPSING IN PORTHLEVEN... (My poem about The Flowerpot Men & the boats in Porthleven's harbour, Cornwall...)

 Collapsing In Porthleven…

It was rather like when the gardener returned from lunch

And the wobbling, uncoordinated Bill and Ben,

Not to mention the neurotic Little Weed,

Simply dropped forwards into a state of collapse

Until the gardener went away again

And it became safe, it was assumed,

For the trio to jerk to life once more beneath visible strings,

So that the unintelligible ‘flobadobs’ were resumed,

Translated by a woman who surely made it all up

In her BBC accent, merely an interpreter’s hunch…

And so it happened in Porthleven,

As the harbour’s sea receded with a whimper.

Moored vessels, having bobbed and fidgeted

Upon a late June tide

Simply leaned sideways and eventually slumped,

Awkward, helpless, hapless and quite uneven.

Rope lines and loose fittings clicked their anger

At the ignominy of listing to one side

In glum mud, like hulks abandoned and dumped,

Until, naturally, the turning tide

Would lift the boats once more to a gentle, rippling pride… 

Pete Ray…

I watched the fleet of small launches and vessels drop 

uselessly sideways in the inner harbour, as the tide receded in June 2019 and I was reminded of the BBC children’s TV programme, ‘The Flowerpot Men’.

I should maybe get a life…