On a train

I wish I could describe to you
in your cramped house with the sheltered garden
the spaciousness I see,
the expanse I feel
when riding in a train
across the plain.

The windows have magic glass
that deepens the green,
intensifies the verdure
(why, even the bank at the side of MKC
- opposite the glass block -
is daisy-spotted and green)
that you whizz past on a train:
the crowded June leaves bursting out of the trees on the line,
and the fields and pastures and ragged hedges
on the plain.

And if I had a laptop with me
or several Ordnance Survey maps
I could maybe identify the stations I wasn't quick enough to read
and the canals that now and again lie alongside
and the occasional wooded hill
across the plain.

But of course there are landmarks,
the rise that looms by Macclesfield,
the slag-heap north-west of Nuneaton,
the dark walls where the line divides to Northampton.

And there is another branch line that goes - where?
backed by much hedging and many trees,
so we seem to be hemmed in a hidden valley.
On the way back a line of containers waits there
red, blue, orange against the viridian
and then I see an aged sign, TO CREWE AND THE NORTH
and an old-fashioned arrow,
and perhaps that handsome grey building I glimpsed
really does belong to Shugborough Hall.

And I wish I could describe the wide, changing sky,
how the light falls and livens the scenen, or fades and makes it sombre,
the broad rays that sometimes streak from a cumulus cloud,
the pathos of the golden evening and the sunset
as the sandstone spires and the grey towers greet me distantly
and the successions of pylons converge
near my childhood home
far across the plain.

Sometimes I wonder, shall I ever visit
those towns and villages beyond the glass -
Stoke-on-Trent, Rugeley, Polesworth,
Heaton Chapel, Norton Bridge, Holmes Chapel -
and those other, unnamed settlements
on the plain?

And maybe one of the other passengers, London-bound,
Will wish they could alight (like me)
at Milton Keynes,
where the bank is dotted with daisies.