Travelling by night
When the numbers
rattle through my dreams,
back and forth like abacus beads,
I take a trip to that place
where I glimpse
the beginning of things,
my years a puff
of cotton grass pollen
blown over the lochans and knockans
of your forty million,
your granite capped peaks
pale as spun sugar
in the slant evening sun.
I don't leave after tea, as we do,
or break the journey in a value
for money hotel. I go in another time
travelling north with the sun
always bright enough to light
a companion moon,
just high enough to pick out
the landscape's folds, so clear
they come close, embrace
the long lakeland curve of the M6
as a young mother might
in plump, capable arms,
then, before Glasgow,
the windmills settle into neat rows,
limbs outspread to keep their distance.
Sue Butler grew up a convent-educated Catholic and studied medicine in the time of Women's Liberation and of having it all: a career in General Practice, husband and sons. In retirement she took up walking and Creative Writing, considering both to be unpredictable forms of meditation on life in all its grace, pain and peculiarity.
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