Down the rabbit hole
John Barrow’s Cottage, Dragley
Beck, Tanyard – ticks them off
her fingers – walks the dog, sees
hares in the fields. Rope Walk,
Sandside, Outcast – sees myxamatosed
rabbits in the wood behind the Bay Horse
- just where the gas storage tank stands,
round, green and somehow comforting,
god knows why as the gas stinks.
Ticks them off her fingers: Canal
Tow Path, rickety wooden ladder
down to the water, stripped off
one summer, swam in oily filth
with Pauline, aged 15 - daft buggers!
Otters swim here now, no longer home
to shopping trolleys, dead dogs
no longer polluted to its gills,
no longer ships sail up and down
the canal, cargoes of slate, stone
wool and cotton up and down
the broad back of water. Back
by the Tanyard, no stink of
tanned hides piled high on flatbed trucks,
strapped down: cured, tannin’ed, limed
layers of skins curled up
like autumn leaves. Back down
West End Lane where hares once boxed
the moon in marshy fields of kingcups and
ladies’ smocks, where once ‘below a time’ a child
cradled a pee-wit chick in her palms for a moment,
before placing it gently down among tufts of grass
for its mother to find.
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