Civitas

for Peter Carpenter

drove stakes in.

                         So that in good time

the stockade framed pictures of the wilderness.

                         So with all settlement.

I too keep watch.

I trample the nettles down which stand outside

the shored-up wall of Peterhouse on guard. For here,

as in 1280, Library and Hall secure,

the city of Cambridge ends

                     and the beautiful and fertile desolation

of the Fen Country begins:

willow and mare’s tail, heron and lacewing,

ditch-water, tussock grass and the endless sky.

There are times when the rain

comes and comes again, and then the earth

turns to water, the pollarded willows stand

in water, paths disappear, and flocks

of waterbirds, their empire welling back,

honk, as if humankind had never been.

The poet Michael Longley, a gentle man

who knows too well those lovers of their race,

those neighbours who on Saturdays

plant bombs in civic centres – he told me

‘I love looking at holes in roads,

when workmen dig up gas-pipes or whatever,

and you glimpse the soil buried for generations

and you see there can be no continuing city.’

Beneath tarmac, beyond city walls,

what have we lost or gained?

                                               I remember

a day in the 1970s when a coach

taking me into London, toward sunset,

was stopped short

by a herd of cattle homeward bound, their herdsmen

driving them on across the strip of road

bisecting Wanstead Common. There it was:

suburb, and pasture, and cars in a slowed procession,

the unschooled drivers leaning on their horns,

and against a damson sky, in silhouette,

this scene from Samuel Palmer,

Arcadian not millenarian.