Robert Maslen

Bradford, UK

Robert’s poems and stories have appeared in Pennine Platform, The Caterpillar, The Frogmore Papers, and The Morning Star. His children’s book ‘Gabriel’s Windmills’ was recently a Year 5 class reader.

Work suspended 19^th May 2020.

FLATLAND SURGERY BLUES

When we cut the A1’s

ceremonial ribbon,

time smooths out ahead

like a wax cloth on the landscape.

Winter has stripped it all bare.

That’s the cold’s chief virtue –

a surgeon’s bland perspective

on things you might have guessed at

but chose instead to ignore.

Now, like it or not, you look.

The soil in the potato fields

is weary, but refuses to rest,

not yet, not today, not before

we’ve seen the North Sea

and had a bit to eat.

Birches front for stands

of dried-out conifers,

coaxing the road further

into mist and mystification.

Somewhere, far ahead,

are Oslo and St. Petersburg,

and centuries of forest

littered with the coins

of serfdom, the rough manners

of minor officials at god-

forsaken staging posts.

Lorries mimic oxen

either side of us,

ploughing a tarmacked steppe

to the onboard bar

where drivers slump and steam

their socks at an imaginary grate.

Stories that would die,

otherwise, circulate this way

in the arteries of Europe,

giving us a point of reference,

like a samovar, or tea pot,

so there’s somewhere to depart from

and return to.

                             The traffic

thickens after the bridge.

As we turn off to the hospital

a lad on a squeezed Kawasaki

gives someone the finger

and is swallowed utterly.