Cruel
cruel
In the grey hush of a London morning the rain boils the street‑lamps
and drips into the boots of strangers who hurry past without a glance.
The wind is cruel, it steals coats and whispers across the Thames,
and even the pigeons, those crusty little philosophers, carry their own *metre of misery.
The old war‑troops still sit in a square, no longer “favourites” on the crests of hills,
their eyes, dulled by a life of guns and graveyards, see only the cold truth:
Cruleness does not lift; it compresses like a weight that the city has learned to carry.
The chef’s finger never remembers the gentle taste of kindness.
In a corner kitchen under a flickering gas‑lamp an apprentice chops onions,
his hands blunted by the bite of months spent fitting his shadow to the sinuous sullen maw of the world.
Outside, the football ground glows a luminous dark, the scent of a signed, bruised suitor.
A ticket‑taker thumps a “final whistle” on a poster of “farewell” and, with a swipe of her glove, sees the cruel sting of empty seats.
Yet cruelty can also be woven through pages of grief—
a mother whose favourite child never crept awake at night,
her lullaby refusing the soft cooing of a motherly sigh.
It lies in the silence, like a razor’s edge, trimming.
But see, the cruel has a second face.
The truth that there are strangers in shelters, who have no scar to scatter across their brow,
who hold hope as a lantern that flickers faintly—
the cruelty lies not in their absence of kindness but in the noise that bleeds it away.
The children's laughter cracks beside the tram as a man wryly smiles,
a simple lamp in a crooked corner that erases the smudges of yesterday’s angry god.
If cruelty were a colour, it would be a shade of slate,
an old memory that refuses to fade.
Even the whisper of a softer voice,
the shiver of patience across a worn foot,
is all that lies to quell this harshness for a heartbeat.
And so the city in its own way, with its cobblestones and its forcing clock‑hands,
learns to swallow the hard wind, to find a place for tender shadows
and inhale deeply—peace, brief, but against the relentless cruelty.
