The ghost road
…
lightest pale-yellow whitening moorland grass stretching
waved wind shifts slow flows again in the uplands plateau
distant raven specked black wheel unhinged glide soars
in white grey clouded skies above the flat worn track
…
sinister Catherine wheeled turbines, hypnotically spin,
the latest transient seal these margins have no value
this hard edged landscape has no worth in any time
giant windmills stud and transfigure the landscape
the latest scarring, killing the calm of the ghost road
another sacrifice made of wilderness and this time
in a land of golden plovers and the call of curlews
nothing is sacred where sustainability is concerned.
…
I walked wild on the high slopes when I was a child
in a sheep trailed playground on black curtained slopes,
white grassed land walked once by so many men,
so many breathless men taking the air on a Sunday
in the silence of a long year, in those hardest of times
too many deaths, too many unannounced leavings
too many lives unlived, cut short and each one
someone’s child, someone’s daughter, someone’s son.
…
on the mountains high slope men walked there
to still splayed nerves frayed thrummed tension
the wired flex electric cables naked in white daylight,
for so many days I’d walk out onto this ghost road
it was a place to breathe clear air, a place to be alone,
a gathering place for collecting remnants, a day’s thoughts,
a place of quietness, of the skylark, a place of wildness too
a place of calm and the wind blowing in from Atlantic seas.
…
I look constantly back to a past but what of the present?
And those places in the choir stalls emptied, unfilled,
in the cold ground, the boys and the girls lay stilled,
sacrifices of a different kind, somehow progress allowed.
©robcullen2021
Celfypridd 