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Emma-Jane Arkady

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Describing England

In the cell she has dreams of an England described in a one inch OS map
no blue lines describing the arc of a track that is cut
through deep into soils with a ridge and a furrow,
just Elm trees erect as the telegraph poles with the birds
lined out on the lanes over tracks into pollarded woods
detached from the cities constrained and aligned
to a Roman road with a name from a world even older;
a history planned and evented with varied tastes,
with erratic delights in a field turning over with stone.
She looks back
                            to this land before Fodens came up from the south,
to their units of hi-bay and armco and tractors to shunt them
their loads of corrosive and toxic, their fumes on the route
that cut past the hedge at the end of her garden
in green in the shire and lilac;
it is a taunting call, the rumble of traffic in lanes that invest
the calm of the country with shite.
                                                         She took risks
in escaping this threat through the doors of prescription
the calming that came with drug for a pain in the face, now addicted
to times when her life was a safer thing in the arms of a mother, and place:
a state that knew nothing of later arrest in the streets
for the dealing in codeine on corners of blocks for the dulling of pain
induced by the darker estate of a map with the green bits erased.

 

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