Flight
1.
I was a cuckoo child, left by a consumptive widow
on the wing. My nest a tied-cottage that already housed
a pair of weaving daughters. But a boy does not need looks
to marry. I had a body that could work the land
and survive a journey on a train, though I’d yet to see one.
The estate will not be cleaved, sheep blackened
or hunting routes halted by clattering iron
Cheshire’s ‘old money’ bellows from the library.
Safe with our cows and cabbages we did not fear machinery
until a mutation came, tested our steepest gradients
and sang like thrushes their chorus of steam – the power
that could smash the slow way we moved within our shells
and pull us wriggling from the soil.
The Young Lord, schooled only in gambling and buggery,
enters politics and his family raise a toast.
To the railways and their generous compensation.
2.
I am cursed by my past complaints:
milking at first light,
the inadequate plough,
poaching in the dank woods.
There is an uncommon mourning
for what was never your own.
Inside the mills of Manchester
we call the countryside.
The overseers, like crows,
have a memory for faces.
They recognise our youngest
not from her missing fingers
but by the look she wears
since they came, as a murder,
to cut off her hair.
3.
As the first locomotive
pulls into Liverpool Road,
behind the blanket
that divides
our damp basement,
my sisters are dreaming
of screech owls.
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