Amazing how hard it sometimes can be to find things on the intertubes. There was a poem I remembered from my London teaching days and I tried every which way to find it.

It was about fruit piled up in a market so I tried all kinds of variations on a search theme and came up with nothing. I even tried the wisdom of crowds using #SherlockPoems on Twitter and wrote about it here:

#SherlockPoems and Nostalgia: Claude McKay and D.H. Lawrence

It yielded results that were interesting but not the poem that was noodling in the back of the head,

The poem was on a GCSE English exam and I remember using it in class and finding myself baffled that the students decided they couldn’t “understand” it.

I expect they thought they couldn’t decipher the hidden message that all poems are supposed to have and cheerfully decided it was all beyond them as a kind of pre-emptive strike. A healthy student defense mechanism if you think about it.

I remember telling them to close their eyes and imagine a walk down Electric Avenue on a late afternoon in winter when the light was fading.

Electric Avenue is part of Brixton Market in South London and is so-called because it was the first market street to be lit by electricity.  And Brixton Market was full of stalls piled high with tropical fruits. This was one of the things it was famous for as it catered to the Caribbean-British clientele of the neighborhood. Market stalls piled high with tropical fruit was a familiar sight to these students. 

And then – in the process of clearing out junk in the basement – there it was! Not by woman poet from the sub-continent as I had vaguely remembered but by Jon Stallworthy, the poet and biographer of Wilfred Owen. 

The Street of the Fruit Stalls

Wicks balance flame, a dark dew falls 
in the street of the fruit stalls 
melon, guava, mandarin 
pyramid-piled like cannon balls, 
glow red-hot, gold-hot, from within. 

Dark children with a coin to spend 
enter the lantern’s orbit; find 
melon, guava, mandarin- 
the moon compacted to a rind, 
the sun in a pitted skin 

They take it , break it open, let 
a gold or silver fountain wet 
mouth, fingers, cheek, nose, chin; 
radiant as lanterns, they forget 
the dark street I am standing in. 

–  Jon Stallworthy

And there on the page in the basement were the exam questions too. Here they are:

No wonder I got blank looks. Who would want to answer any of them, except to pass an exam.

For many years Stallworthy worked at the Oxford University Press and for a while he was posted to the Karachi office. His collection Out of Bounds  was published soon thereafter. Reasonable then to imagine the setting of the poem to be Pakistan. But it works well for Brixton too.