Ode to Port Eliot

I grew up in the sort of town
Where a single use of the word ‘noun’
Earns you the epithet ‘professor’
Or ‘twat’
Yet here I stand on the teeming lawn
Trying to impress passing girls with an unsolicited
Mini-lecture on the etymology of ‘ha-ha’ (n.)
It never works
Not even when Arcadian day ripens to Bacchanalian night
But this, this is the first place
Where I dared to dream it might

By Tim Clare, a writer, poet and musician performing in Found in Translation.