LANDLOCKED Tied to a flat land Of reclaimed pits and winding river The railway has gone Coal blackened tracks have grown over Every wind caresses its absence The silent factories know their part But cannot speak, chains hold fast Beyond pale gates and security huts Poppies and cow parsley, ragwort and buddleia A necklace of flowers…
Tag: the drifting village
The Shipstone Star
THE SHIPSTONE STAR Red lead rain lashed to pink hangs like a soviet star on the left side of Nottingham’s tunic. Always east facing, a towering symbol. The dawn of a century personified, rusts above a city of casual workers, bicycles and the hard slogging dutiful dead who fleck fields from the Rhone to the…
Downland Ballad I :Photo-disintegration
Fully five acres further east and fifty years on from Harwell’s neutron beam photo-disintegration a clump of Queen Anne’s Lace* wavers like a bridesmaid’s posy above the quarried chalk and flint of this erased line. The track that gravelled and iron girded once carried trundling freight to Southampton docks and salt air. Like a distant…