As we leave the slip road and join the flow
north of cosmopolitan wagons,
discounted coaches, fleet cars and the rare,
pre-twenty-first-century vehicle
like ours, we see a buzzard, on a fence post,
still as a cast in the emollient
winter sun. We have travelled this road
a quarter of a century, know
the remains – a single track railway;
sparse English elms in rigor mortis –
stilled sentinels of clearance and enclosure;
ridges and furrows made by feudal
open fields; a gothic hunting tower…
Later, as always, we see Mow Cop Castle –
a Georgian folly, on a hill to the east –
lit briefly by the sunset’s splendour
and hope we are no more than an hour
from home. Turning west, there are purple skies
brimming with hail. When it falls, we slow.
As the pellets shatter on the roof,
we talk loudly of that bird on a post
in a southerly shire.
By David Selzer
