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Ruth Bidgood

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Viaduct

This narrow road was a railway once.
A plain bridge carries it over a stream
that drops through tree-tangle.  How the road
was borne so high I had hardly wondered,
till I found at one side a path down
past great pillows of seeding willow-herb, down
through deep shade to a meeting of green tracks.

Here, suddenly sunlit, tall and close,
were dark brick towers of more than a bridge -
a little viaduct.  There was nothing to compare
with lovely Cynghordy, that gracefully steps
arch after arch across a valley;
yet this lesser thing, functional, hidden,
was built with verve,  Purplish towers,
strong-set on stone;  pattern of quoins;
black metal ties, each a twofold cross,
spidery but tough, were confident,
dramatic.
                     Sleepers that carried the rails
now made the road’s unseen floor.  Through a slit
between roadway and fence up climbed and clung
bramble, growing from world to world.  In the lower realm,
to south, south-east, north-east the green lanes ran,
older by far than the railway, their traffic gone,
their life in abeyance.  On today’s road
I walked across the bridge, seeing now by the fence
the giddy slit over depths, and along it
the topmost curls of bramble springing through.

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