The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley

East of here

  the landscape ripples, grows dense

  with ancient compounds of woods

  and itinerant back lanes,

  dips and drops, acrobatic,

  reveals secrets, inherits itself,

  pulls the boundaries from under you,

  reminds you of other places you’ve been

  – is like nowhere else at all.

  Rolls and spools along the

  A5’s spine, draws a line

  at the motorway’s hard shoulder

  then beds down, irons out

  towns between the clouds and warehouses.

  It ranges thick and derelict,

  shadows strange familiar terraces with

  hosiery mills, shoe factories, long

  boarded up and passed into

  the afterlife of a thousand trades.

  Accents lift and lilt

  with the Soar in the water table

  watering up to the north,

  planning vowels flat to the south,

  whilst the sky grows and falls

  lean and flat-out into the Fens.