This particular road is unmade
veering between council oversight
and quad bike trail
not quite unadopted but close
sometimes its beech hedges beckon each other
across the washed out culvert.
A green rime skins its surface
through the plantation; the unused centre
soft with moss and cleavers.
There’s an estate called Kilbewley with lodges
and gates and sheep graze over broken walls
the burn bank is all wrinkled like cloth pulled tight.
I am almost through the shortcut.
But in the last long curve of the road,
birch regrowth on plantation mounds,
nettles and dog mercury, this corner
always slows me down
the sweep of it, the earthworks that hide beneath
the obvious history:
the fact that we curled and grew here together like leaves
and never went back.
Bridget Khursheed is a poet and geek based in the Scottish Borders; a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award winner for poetry, her pamphlet Roads to Yair is published by Twinlaw and she is widely published in magazines including Ambit, The Rialto, Abridged, New Writing Scotland, Zoomorphic and Gutter; when not writing she is studying for an MSc in cybersecurity or counting waterbirds and waders on the River Tweed; @khursheb.
More work by Bridget Khursheed
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