A Burial Corridor
“Surely what is needed now is a grand strategic vision for green burial places to reclaim our cities with urban and peri-urban woods and forests and for it to be a requirement for trunk transport routes to include linear wildlife burial corridors alongside them” – Professor John Ashton, ‘Necropolis in crisis’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Is there a better way to see you off
than amidst the screeching and the hum
of wheedling engines, feistily gobbling
automated fuel? There is no better. I remember
hirpling over the dream-M62
past crop-circles. Past cottages and cotton-clouds
& you in the passenger-seat. I felt you breathe
against the dashboard & I reckoned that
somehow I’d clawed a road into your heart
(or, at least, some blocked-off artery…)
They grew an oak tree. Day by day, it guides –
miniature – the frantic traffic through the road
burdened with busy prayers & sacred sights
& burdened with my deaf-drone pilgrimage
among the whiplash-sky and metal-rain.
There is no better. God or this guide has seated you
among a gas-leak meadow in the stars.
Sam Hickford is a poet and journalist who has never been naked on a golf course before, contrary to popular belief. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Tablet, Ink Sweat & Tears, Amethyst Review, The Ofi Press, and on selected banana skins in the Greater London area.