How the deserted industrial landscapes of Scotland can lend themselves to poetry was demonstrated last week by two powerful little poems about bings or slag heaps. Disused railway tracks prompted today’s elegiac reflection by Tom Pow. The poem was first published by Canongate in 1987 and is included in The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (EUP, 2005).
A FAVOURITE STRETCH OF DISUSED RAILWAY
Dalbeattie to Dumfries Line
Turn sharp right off the forestry track.
~
You’re on a path of large granite chips
shrouded by silver birch. This will lead you
onto the viaduct. Here the birch become
glossy saplings, the stones one long rockery
for wild strawberry, for the palest green tree shoots.
~
From here you can see how well-appointed
the big houses are; their stables boarded up now
and windows broken, but your eye led to them
by the fold of the landscape, by the command
of trees, as surely as in any Claude.
~
A hawk skims the variegated tops
of an arboretum – cyprus, copper beech,
improbable monkey puzzle. Your spirit
goes with it – for you are halfway
to flying here, riding these great arcs of air
With only a mane of rough stone to hold onto.
~
At the end of the viaduct, a broken grey stile.
The path weeps into a green baize, stitched
with tiny white stars. A moped, clogged with rust,
stands alone; the garish flowers on its petrol tank
almost fading as you look. Playful ghosts
crowd in on you. Old beech trees
spread their arms in perfect planes.
~
When the path becomes a path again,
it is a sodden mud-track, a fine silt
of rootless earth, whose depth you could not judge,
if not aware of that broken vertebrae beneath.
One pool, clear of the choking tagliatelle of algae,
still shows the sharp edges of a few pinkish pieces
of granite. Everywhere else marsh marigolds
sway imperiously in teased-out stems.
(to be concluded)
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