Once, walking hooves defined the old drove road;
white lines control it now. This empty house
served ale to rogues and highwaymen. Like them
its guts have rotted to bare bony spars,
a gallows clattering in the western gales.

The hamlet served the traveller. No-one now
remembers the foul dust of summer days,
the blackened mud of winter churned by droves
of cattle, channelled to their final end
in towns far south of here. Schoolhouse and school
long closed, the children of this stony land
are gone too. Motorway and rail slide smooth
as easy promises between the hills.

Raw nettles crowd in sheaves around a farm
whose sagging beams and slipping green slate roof
lean inward over floorboards scoured by rain.
Here she was shackled to her father's life,
where she fed stock and mended crumbling walls,
till middle age weighed down her dancing feet;
saw the world pass her by, saw love denied,
and poverty creep closer year by year,
to steal the final feathers from her wings.

She walked away into a summer dawn
and saw and did not see the shining day.
She left the gate unlatched, and took the steps
that led down to the line; she looked along
and waited for the trembling of the steel,
the beating wheels of the express; the hiss,
the rush of air, on which she leaned, and flew.