Riding Northwards on the GNER to Edinburgh
by and published in Edition Three of Pomegranate
“Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.”
—‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, John Donne
That time when we turned our backs on sorrow
and watched time reverse with our northern passage
through speckled meadowland and harvest crows
rucking into the hayrolls, past old kirks and burges,
the walls and spans of greystone and yorkstone
and under the cathedral arches of Newcastle station,
Berwick’s steads and scarps threshed to the skin-ridged seas,
herds cliff-perched and hovels plotted between course
and rocks, the lead and slate roofs flung
from centuries ago into the vales before us,
each spire a reformation, every hedge a land act,
every colour so strong it left us like batik.
The nets we spread need flocks of gulls
to hoist them up to beauty.
Every loss cuffs us to misery –
the ancient hedges, the ties to the centuries old,
when gone, leave us reduced and unrestored,
but, through time, consoled.
George Ttoouli
George Ttoouli is 28 years old. He works in London as the Education Projects Co-ordinator at the Poetry Society and in Coventry as an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme. As a freelancer he edits British Pensioner and co-edits Gists and Piths and The Oubliette. He received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship in 2004 and was commended for creative non-fiction in 2007 by New Writing Ventures. He is fairly convinced that he shouldn’t be writing poetry, but he just can’t stop.