Peter Scupham
Two Sections from Excavations
III
A dual carriageway of chalk and mud
Betrays earth’s tender hoardings.
Willow herb, abundant on the site,
Seeds a vivid life on sufferance.
Yellow machines drone their defoliations:
Give me a lever and I will move the world.
Exhausted aeons flare: life melts away
In a pother of bluish dust. The wind
Flutters a gay festoon of plastic pennons —
These towering inclines are defensible.
From half a bridge, a missed connection,
I consider this arterial surgery.
The land’s bones lie in disarray;
Unreadable, her draughty palimpsest.
A new imperium holds, where scholars came
To grub for broken Rome with hasty fingers.
IX
Willow and osier take possession now
In a field of stones, dug out for victory.
I take the vanished cat-walk over the pits,
Feel the heavy belting slope towards me.
Black cycles of time: an endless drudge
And hoist of labouring iron. Recurrences.
A coarse rush of pebbles and water
Churns and stirs in the grilled cylinder.
I hear again that antique grind,
The flail threshing a cold harvest.
Perched on a conglomerate of rust,
I finger a belemnite’s unthreaded needle
And the chaff flies. Where are the screens
To wash and filter these memorials?
The gravel throws its cataracts away;
The room shakes to these dislocations.
Page(s) 7-8
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