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.
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By David Selzer