![\"photogram4\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/photogram4.jpg?resize=300%2C300&ssl=1\" "\\"photogram4\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Fully five acres further east
\nand fifty years on from Harwell’s neutron beam photo-disintegration
\na clump of Queen Anne’s Lace* wavers like a bridesmaid’s posy
\nabove the quarried chalk and flint of this erased line.
\nThe track that gravelled and iron girded once
\ncarried trundling freight to Southampton docks and salt air.<\/p>\n
Like a distant memory of past expectations
\nI wander through past journeys, delineations
\nchew on the fresh air like a discontented Wordsworth
\nnow free,\u00c2\u00a0free to roam where I will
\nBut nothing is moving here these days, no air pulses
\nthrough the gilded corn, american maize is rigid<\/p>\n
All rhythm, rhyme and reason curtailed
\nbut for the hover of Kite and wizz of combustion engines
\nI’m left standing in a shower of butterflies,
\nclimate driven, wheeling
\nbaffling the constant walkers and their dogs with
\nshowers of atoms, as they spin into extinction.<\/p>\n
The land is porous, half soaked with the elixir
\nand charms of the abandoned plastic barrels concoctions.
\nA squadron of rooks bank and wheel in tight formation
\nland and beaks probe at all the matter before them.
\nBeady eyed they cannot count the consequences
\nof all that steel now disappearing from the horizon.<\/p>\n
In a damp corner of a thatched cottage
\nan artist* peels Queen Anne’s Lace from the paper
\nDips it gently into a brimming tray of liquid
\nand the fusion of paper and molecules of silver re-arranging
\nmaps a negative of stalk, leaf and stamen.
\nUp north the furnaces fizzle and peak for the century.<\/p>\n
Sheffield steel, Welsh coal, Cornish tin, the land exhausted
\npot-marked and reclaimed in a thousand regeneration schemes,
\nThe process of covering the tracks of a century of production
\nis taken up by rose bay willow herb, buddleia and oxford ragwort,
\neach seeking to mask the brick and fence beneath it.
\nIn the laboratory the encased hand holding the uranium phial quivers<\/p>\n
as an owl is lit by a police cars headlights on the perimeter.
\nIts flash of white against a wilderness of dark down-land
\nlike that brief explosion, that jolt of life in a vacuum.
\nThe century starts to implode
\ndraws itself as a negative image, trickles, spits and fuses
\nthe image of a landscape removed becomes these islands.<\/p>\n
The bromide stains her fingers, the plant collapses into stalk and seed
\nas she raises its negative to the kitchen window.
\nShe stands looking at it again in the porchlight amidst the blackout
\nrealising that all this movement above and below, these planes, these tanks
\nhurtling towards the coast and far fields of France are dying already
\nA moth singes against the candle flame, erupts into vapour, darkness.<\/p>\n
![\"harwell\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/shaunbelcher.com\/writing\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/harwell.jpg?resize=500%2C190&ssl=1\" "\\"harwell\\"")