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George Kendrick

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Dirgers

Derailment. Round the valley
a horse-shoe of cinders
glowing with ghoulish walkers
hooded orange, red, grey.

One of the many paths
where trains give way to ramblers,
lovers, runners, solitary amblers —
railless, rain leaning in swathes.

A bevy of gaudy monks
on pilgrimage. Boots and socks
mourn with the colour of bogs
lurched out of by limping ranks —

Never more of them than today –
since night rutting a moor
that has been trackless. Feet sore
on solitude’s crowded way.

Twenty miles on, and stones
wear upward out of heather:
wildness is trodden; we weather
a road, to show its bones —

For getting away from it all
overturns cities, peoples
the staggering dawn with torches
and achieves no goal

unless this is how roads get made
— not quite on purpose — and
(though it’s lost its rails) how this ten-thousand-
year-old railway was laid.

 

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