The Man By Canary Wharf Poem by Faruk Ahmed Roni

The Man by Canary Wharf


He walks by Millharbour,
where the river bends,
silver under twilight.

The towers loom,
glass and steel,
rising like silent sentinels,
a city built on the hum of money,
the quick pulse of fortune's chase.

He sits at the edge,
watching the water ripple,
watching Canary Wharf,
that once gave this place its name.

It flits against the skyline,
fragile in the shadow of ambition.

He breathes the air of the financial zone,
fresh, sharp,
tinged with a promise that never spoke to him.

Thirty-five years
in the same old council flat,
its brick walls holding his life
like cupped hands.

He remembers
before this forest of towers,
when the sky was wide,
when the city whispered rather than roared.

Now it grows and throbs,
a world he cannot touch.

He walks its streets every day,
a foreigner in his own land.

He has no office,
no loft,
no business here,
nor place to live,
only footsteps that pass unnoticed,
like a ghost
through mirrored corridors.

His sighs rise,
unseen smoke curling upward,
burning the edges of his soul.

He feels the weight of it
this city that is not his,
this kingdom that closed its gates long ago.

Yet still, he walks.
By the river,
by the harbour,
through streets lit with a glow
that never warms his skin.

The place he belonged to long ago…
Still, he walks in a mourn.