Silt Road

A slip of the ear and I’m in Samarkand,

a road through wheat fields flushed with poppies, fluttering

like silken banners over spears,

shimmering heat which coalesces in

a mirage of water and voices from the East.

A ripple to the south the Romans marched

where silting water settled to a bodied land,

a causeway on a waterway that was,

beside a waterway that was,

as land and water struggled like a pod of eels.

 

The past, exotic tales, a foreign land

are barely covered by the web of fields, each road,

each dyke a silken thread drawn tight –

the new land woven from the marsh and peat.

Beside the Roman farms the eagle hovered, poised

to stoop and kill, and still the kestrels glide

the margins of the fields. The Fenmen fished and walked

across the water melting into mist,

the mist in which the drained land drowned,

its liquid language foreign to Dutch engineers.

 

Of wealth and distant markets selling cloth

this land knew nothing. Down the rivers and the roads

drained crops and slaves and gold to feed

the fashion of the times. The noble wives

of Rome clothed naked wealth in fabric barely seen

but worth its weight in gold; the Eighty now

may strut the catwalk of their wealth but underneath

the poor and refugees still flood, the stream

of affluence is silting up,

and though they’ve raised the banks, the water rises still.

 

The merest tissue of a Chinese moth

flew over Caesar’s triumph, but these banners brought

Rome down. Luxuriant display

did not feed armies, farmers or the land;

the picturesque does not pump water. These fields grew

fruitful by the plough and those who labour;

with foreign tongues or from the East, they share one truth:

the Silk Road is a mirage stealing joy

from poppies, sustenance from wheat.

Like us, on leaving Nordelph, Silt Road shrugs it off.