The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley

by Silkworms Ink Anthologies

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