Wrong Number Poem by John a'Beckett

Out of a shimmering city noon
crowd-thick and traffic-heavy,
it's individual noises pampered to a groan;
on busy Swietokrzyska Street, a public phone
rings, bellows loud its ringing,
cutting through the drone
as if to make a trance of it.
But no one answers it

The granite patience of my Poles.
Everything about this phone
among the others queued for,
cards pushed in, dialed, spoken into, so alone
disappears into disbelief, the accepting stone
and live-long lesson where we learn
to live with every still-existing thing
including its persisting ring

Who can this caller be?
Some silenced conscience suddenly let free?
The answer to a prayer
half-prayed but meant to reach
now washed up drift-wood
on this people-pebbled beach?
Or then from some grand malaise, the tonic
now transformed, gone telephonic?

Or some trapped message now
in blinking fits at three
short of a receiver and unfit to bear
the pressing silence, cracked,
gone for the last call
and in this deafening glare
hit the jugular and called from there
up anyone from anywhere?

Thinking it's for me
or somehow knowing that it is:
some clandestine friend and his
following my movements,
I pick it up, put the mouth-piece cup
to my lips and let forth in gaps
'a'Beckett.. here! '.But he, perhaps
knowing that it is me just...hangs up