about a motorway

about a motorway

who tarmacked the carters’ track

where mummers danced with acrobats

and pilgrims singing praises,

telling stories, making babies,

wended their way to Walsingham?

who felled the ‘hangman’s oak’

uprooted mandrakes, crushed sweet cicely,

to carve a motorway

where helter-skelter madcap drivers

head for auto self-destruction?

they have no time for buttercup teas

beside gentle trickling sunshine streams

watching clouds and dreaming dreams

no time to wander bluebell dells

where red-haired girls in white lace dresses

wove daisy chains for necklaces

nothing’s left of the one-room school

where we learned our tables

and joined up writing

no trace of the pond we fished

for newts and toads and sticklebacks

taking them home to certain death

in jam or pickled onion jars

who cares that the woody glade

where we played cowboys

and the Indians never won, is gone,

and in its place, a pet food outlet,

Ikea, and a Sainsbury's Homebase?

just the ghosts of red-haired girls

weeping where ox-eye daisies grew,

weaving wreaths of asphodel

to drape the necks of hedgerow creatures

foxes, hares, and Brock the badger.