The A55 to North Wales
To you it was a road, a thin red line
in an atlas, junctions to be noted,
their numbers told.
My knees were spread with maps,
my eyes were counting exits.
But my mind was charting
startling openings of sea,
mountain shoulders shrugging off
great clouds of white, silvered
by the western light,
and in their thousands, ox-eye daisies,
in drifts like snow on verges,
spikes of purple orchid sudden
in between. And I have learned to
recognise terrain by living things,
steer by the seasons and the light.
by Gill McEvoy
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
Categories: Making Sense
Beautiful. I love the second stanza especially, as it flows over into the third.
A deceptively simple but very effective poem. You have caught not only the A55 but also the sense that the landscape is the map that matters. How often we see the countryside as nothing more than a road map these days and miss what is there…
Excellent. And my kind of navigation too!