The Secret Life of Lamp Posts

The Secret Life of Lamp Posts

Lately I’ve learned that lamp posts are not silent;
(You may have thought it, but it isn’t so.)
Up close they make a creaking, ticking sound
That I struggle vainly to construe.

Perhaps they’re merely played on by the winter wind:
A kind of latter-day Aeolian Harp?
Or are those sounds a sign of life within them:
Some sort of electronic, beating heart?

You see how easily I could succumb to
An inclination to romanticise!
We can’t help but depict the world in human terms
Because we view it through these human eyes.

And so there dawns in my imagination
A comedy with tragic overtones
Where lamp posts, from their static isolation
Send out lonely signals in Morse Code.

But if they now behave rather discreetly
Under scrutiny of broad daylight
I wonder if it’s different when the streets clear
And what ecstatic songs they trill at night.