THE BRIDGE AT HOUGH

And this poem, which will be about England,

and, in some part, the southern margins

of the North, and the vagaries of the tongue,

has already stalled at the title’s fourth word.

Does it rhyme with ‘though’ or ‘tough?  Or with ‘cow’

or ‘row’? That is ‘row’ as in beans, of course,

not as in a shouty altercation.

It is as in ‘huff’, ‘houfe’, ‘hoff’ – from the Old English

for the heel of a hill, a projecting ridge.

 

As you drive through the ancient hamlet,

you do not notice any raised ground or,

indeed, the place – scattered by the road

to the Potteries – but for the signs on leaving

and entering. At one end of the hamlet –

that on the eastern edge of Cheshire –

is the bridge itself: narrow, stone, hump-backed,

replaced and repaired since medieval times.

Beneath the bridge – famed now in the annals

of English verse! – runs Swill Brook, and along

its reedy banks are endangered colonies

of water voles: aka water rats,

rats taupier, arvicola

amphibius. The brook springs limpid

from the clayey earth some miles south, seeps

northwards into the River Weaver’s catchment,

and so into the Mersey, past Liverpool,

through St George’s Channel to the Atlantic.

England’s mercantile empire shoved its

Anglo-Saxon tongue – complete with French veneer

and Greco-Roman embellishments –

down the throats of millions.

 

 

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4 Comments
  • Elise Oliver
    July 29, 2023

    For some reason I thought Michael Rosen had written this.

    • David Selzer
      July 30, 2023

      What a compliment! Thank you.

    • Hugh Powell
      July 31, 2023

      Putting politics and conquest aside, I think this is a compliment to the English language. Demonstrably international, as you describe, it has borrowed and compromised its way into its status as a world tongue, learned and loved for its flexibility and its refusal to insist on absolute syntactical regularity, together with its wonderful ambiguities, and its heritage of writers and thinkers. It is the chosen language of David Selzer, whose international audience, also speaking it, derives much pleasure and satisfaction from knowing and reading him!

  • Elise Oliver
    July 30, 2023

    It should be signed off: ‘Rats arvicola, Boris’