ARTERIAL ROADS

ARTERIAL ROADS

by L. J. Hurst


 

Some roads are still left as I think they were
And I can never drive on them without supposing
That life then, when they were laid, was so different from today.
For those roads, of white concrete or tarmacadam, cement in my mind
The idea of cyclists, riding wind-rosy, on Sunday afternoons,
And I see the clean young clerks, who were
An aesthetic ideal - politically aware and doing well
In their acts of social need, enjoying total orgasm.
A sudden burst of impressions dins in my ears
Like a machine gun and I see their willing force
And power, their wise girl-friends, the poets
And the magazines. Cleaner and more straight
Than the autobahnen, their backs aren't bent
But they are gone and the arterial roads
Still seem as new as an artery's blood.

But perhaps the arteries, the arterial roads were only used,
The young aware were only making escape
From cities, more like ghettoes,
And ghettoes built in the concentration camps
Were their homes. And these roads now
Lead from rusting Service Stations to Nissen-hutted market gardens,
And in them stinking cabbage stalks.
The youths arise everywhere in their flannel suits,
But breeched in Deutschland the Jugend is marching:
They too were clean. Perhaps they were blond
But naked could not be told apart. Still, hope remains.
I think of arterial roads that I should have ridden,
Away from the motors of the decadent, and been as fresh
For experience, for whom Charles Baudelaire was a name
And not a state of mind.


 

 

Note: First published in Ipse: The 'Other' Magazine of the International Poetry Society, No. 2 (April 1976) after being 'Highly Commended' in the 1975 Edmund Blunden Memorial Prize

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© L J Hurst 2003