COMMERCE

By eyes as blue as heaven we are appraised,

and found wanting. Their owners jostle away

squealing. In open sheds high on the moor

hundreds of pinkish pigs, bred in Scotland

to be slaughtered in the Home Counties,

are fattening. Out among the heather

and abandoned bell pits, whose worked-out coal seams

are long grown over, Blackface sheep graze safely.

East, over the sea – blue too today,

and with an oil tanker sailing north –

is the rest of Europe, and, out of sight,

the AI and the East Coast line: West,

the Cheviots, and Eildon Hill’s three peaks

over the border, and centuries

of banditry between.