Astonished brickwork

Ella Street (or at least its residents' association) has a thing about birds, there are bird tables along the length and little model birds attached to street furniture, I've posted about this a while back (here). What I didn't know then but have found since is that this avian fix has extended to putting up little quotes from literature with a birdy theme. Various authors from Wordsworth to Poe were chosen. Anyhow this being Hull and reason being what it is I suppose they could not escape the Larkin effect. At least this is one of his more cheery verses, yes I know it's difficult to believe. 

And while I'm on about old baldy, some of you may recall the fibre glass toads that decorated the town a while back on the celebration (there is no better word for it) of his death some 25 years earlier, well wait five years and suddenly it's thirty years since his death and a reunion of toads is planned this year along with a very large inflatable toad to hang over the town centre. You know a dead Larkin is the gift that keeps on giving ... It's a culcher thing, innit!

This is on the wall of the Jewish cemetery at the far end of Ella Street and close by that delight of modern architecture that I posted the other day .

You want the whole picture and the whole poem? Surely you do, it's really not that long, honest.

Coming 

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon—
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin