When I lived in the city of Melbourne, around the year 2000, I was often entranced by the cosmopolitan nature of different parts of the city. Suburbs had particular ethnicity reflected throughout them, neighboring suburbs a little different. Whole shopping precincts had their own particular ethnic flavor. St Kilda, for instance had cake shops on cake shops – German, French, Jewish.

And Lygon Street, in Carlton was predominantly about Italian cuisine, with a few other nationalities squeezing.

Walking down Lygon Street in the evening was an encounter with street-side diners chatting volubly, ushers of the footpath enticing you to dine at the establishment with a complimentary bottle of wine thrown in. It was a heady hubbub.

Here is part of what I wrote on such a night in the poem Lygon Street:

lygon street is alive tonight
it’s only a thursday
but there are bodies everywhere
looking for a feed in the evening
I can’t avoid a spruiker standing outside
with his best moustache and a menu
twitching at a chance to tempt me in
with a free red wine and something special
but I’m just walking now
taking in the scene and the people
scattered everywhere on a cold night
in the middle of july . . .

Read the rest of the poem Lygon Street, here.

How can you participate? Use my discussion as a prompt to write a poem or some prose on your own blog about a place that has inspired you, then create a pingback to the prompt page or post your link in the comment section –  (please check to ensure your link appears in one form or another). Find out more about pingbacks here.

Around the start of each new month, I’ll list participant links that have appeared as pingbacks or as posted links in the comment section of this post.

If you have any questions, or if you notice that I have messed up something in this process, drop me a line and I’ll probably manage to work it out.

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