Movement

Ten minutes — or less — before we step down at one
of the ‘London Terminals’, ploughed land restarts
and the newest cow-parsley spreads by the side
of fields that held on through the April drought.

The immediate foreground is dashing on past
a stationary middle-distance while
a forest on the horizon, darkly capped
by clouds, races forward at the same speed.

It’s comforting that the laws of perspective and motion
apply as I saw them, forty years back, in some lines
about love and apprehension. These fields we pass
are still, as before, to be considered the green

foundation of everything, sending out kind seeds
into city yards and squares. But some cooling towers
recur here for all their reputed demolition,
and as the suburbs begin mini-hangars appeal

for ‘sellable parts’. Then arrive some further shots
at edgeland enterprise, and a wide terrain
of tracks where it has long been banned and burnt
appears to purge our consciousness of grass,

It insists that moving onwards must come first.
We are where it all ends, people holding hands
into this Terminal for consolation,
and we have to step down. It doesn’t look like love.

Need history be kinder to apprehension?