Buses on the Strand – Poems on the Underground

This poem was originally published in The Idle Demon; a collection of verses (1958).

In 2013 it featured as part of TFL’s Poems on the Underground scheme, appearing in Tube carriages all over London.

The Strand is beautiful with buses,
Fat and majestical in form,
Red like tomatoes in their trusses
In August, when the sun is warm.

They cluster in the builded chasm,
Corpulent fruit, a hundred strong,
And now and then a secret spasm
Spurs them a yard or two along.

Scarlet and portly and seraphic,
Contended in the summer’s prime,
They beam among the jumbled traffic,
Patiently ripening with time,

Till, with a final jerk and rumble,
The Strand tomatoes, fat and fair,
Roll past the traffic lights and tumble
Gleefully down Trafalgar Square.

The Idle Demon is for sale on Amazon and you can pick up a copy of the TFL poster from their web store. (For the avoidance of doubt, we don’t make any money from this).