Lay for the Day 2nd November

The first 72-mile southern stretch of the M1, Britain’s first motorway, opens in 1959, after 19 months of construction (a mile every eight days).
This is not strictly a poem about a motorway, but close enough…

Consolation

Where the A road crosses the Downs
between forest and heath,
leaving behind the ancient towns,
and dips to the ancient city beneath,

where the white-limbed birch and the pines
with trunks like thickening rust
grow closer, to enclose the lines
of hurrying cars, they inspire a trust.

A couple of seasons’ neglect
and the sycamores surge
down embankments and spread unchecked
over barriers, and branches converge.

In a decade or maybe less
bindweed, bramble and nettle
in sharp green squadrons twine and press
and steadily crack the carriageway’s metal,

and before a century’d passed,
as though it never was,
this way would be wooded and grassed.
God knows why that should comfort, but it does.

John Gibbens, from Church of Thorns

The Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar