by Georgia Wingfield-Hayes

The No5 to Blackbird Leys
sounds like a place from a different time
where thick hedgerows ramble
with berries and thorns
and blackbirds rule the roost.

I think I’d like to visit there
and be the stranger in their world,
but I fear their thicket thorny home
will be long gone
the name a ghost
a memory of a wilder time,
where man was not sole master of our world
and other beings had a say
in how it was the land might lay.

Blackbirds in blackberry leys
laid waste by paved modernity.
That divine untidiness
wild and ripe in possibility
of hedgehog, stoat, thrust and wren,
alas I fear they are long gone.

I don’t want to live
in a world of wild ghosts
for in that world I feel half dead
I want that wild chaos instead.
For it brings forth my soul in song
and I am alive and new again.