Boston's elevation

BOSTON'S ELEVATION

(acknowledging John Beckett, 'The city of Boston?', Lincolnshire past & present 49, autumn 2002, p. 18)

Probably not banking the same river

as Botolph's monastery – waters shifted

more in those days – and not an east coast mainline

station since early routes soon shifted too,

but with its tower and famous namesake, why

should Boston, Lincolnshire, not fantasise

above its neighbours? Spalding, Sleaford, King's Lynn

mere towns, but Boston standing as a city

set on a hill cannot be hid, a city

that is at unity. They tried, you know:

in 1944, for their forthcoming

four-hundred-years-of-Charter celebrations,

with help from newly-citied Lancaster,

Boston put in a bid for city status.

But they hadn't Lancaster's royal connections

of duke and castle, weren't a county town,

had non-citied in documentary.

They were politely ushered out. The Charter's

quatercentenary was in the week

of VE Day. And riverwise, my source

says celebrations had to take that course.

This poem is mostly self-explanatory.  It was written in the autumn of 2015 for a Poetry Kit competition on the theme of cities, and published as one of my 13 postings on the Places of Poetry map of England and Wales.

The documentary in which Boston had non-citied was Country town, directed by Sydney Box in 1943.

My interest in Boston was sufficiently piqued by John Beckett's source article for Clare and me to route our 2016 bike tour through the town.  We found the church building a model of itself in Lego, and supplanting thereby an earlier model of the church in wood, that was still lit up in its humbler place at the back.