Convergence
After that first year, they were never the same,
the planners with their Glastonbury smiles, their beatnik topology,
though they still carried the henge inside them,
a degree or two of slippage was lost at the roundabout,
the misjudging of an angle at the viaduct, the boulevard, the pond.
In the interest of economy, the streetlights no longer burned all night,
leaving sudden inverted streaks of darkness; a latter-day geomancy
morphed into cross-sections of the earth: a psychedelic combination
of need and desire, Light Pyramids and urban temples, vertical gods,
shedding blueprints from another world.
But the stones he remembered as a child now squat close to an
underpass, their mainstay fallen, a rippling penny in a pond,
grassy knells reverberating with the smell of piss and diesel.
As he draws near, sharp-eyed for any new message
they might have left him – prayer slips, naïve as grade school,
tucked into their western stones – he feels nothing but the hum
of the fast-lane juggernaut, inhales nothing but the creosote of sticky
asphalt; ear down, he listens for the heartbeat of the henge, as
the moon handstands over the horizon, circles the Jacob’s coat of him,
blue, calculating, possessive.
Jacqueline Haskell has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck. Her debut, The Auspice, was a finalist in both the 2018 Bath Novel Award and the 2020 Cinnamon Prize for Literature. Stroking Cerberus, her first poetry collection, is published by Myriad Editions https://myriadeditions.com/books/stroking-cerberus/
Note:Derek Walker led a team of five young architects in 1970 to create central Milton Keynes (CMK) on a bean field. They were into Stonehenge, the pyramids, ley lines: Midsummer Boulevard, the central axis of MK, would align with the rising sun on the summer solstice.