Love Song for the Ordnance Survey
What of time sluicing through
the dappling immortal rings of hills?
What of hollow-hearted burials,
Saxon naves, felled steeples, hill-forts,
ventilation mine-shafts, brick-born of water towers,
analogue pylon’s cold war transmissions, pill-box viewpoints?
What of the boundary’s arcs,
the stamina of forests’ greened retreat
beaten back at the speckled blots of settlement,
the shaded/sloped river ruts, the symmetry of hangars?
What of the canals descending the lock’s silent-shift,
coal boats and Staffordshire china rising in the hulls and sidelined, quickened
by the railways rising beside motorways rising beside –
What of the medicinal baths, restoring spas sought
by new townsfolk, the tumulus of mill-races
gone save for the great unworking cogs turning nothing
in damp summering fields?
And what of the settlements, inherited after-other names
slumbering in bracketed old-world italics,
the words of places consigned to –
What of danger zones in bold red, shifting eastern coastlines
vanishing faster than any paper can skip a heartbeat to?
(And the winter peaks absolved in mists that can neither
be seen or heard.)
Of all demarcations multiplied
kept in their latitudinal squares –
the map sings of places
and I know
where I must plot my own.
Navigators
Directionless water
darkening, towpaths, tunnels
harkening release into light.
A different trajectory of time,
a melancholy rutting, map-less
dug outs, clay trench.
Each bend marks
the direction of days, months.
A navigation laid
on nameless spines.
The Cat Swindle
Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario
The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley Page 17
