EDWARD THOMAS ON THE CAMINO FRANCES

Let’s suppose you came this way, or your ghost,

to walk beneath the milky way a ghost

among ghosts, the Meseta your Downs writ large;

this via Trajana for your Sarn Helen,

this chalk for your Icknield chalk and Arras chalk

on which your body, still perfect, would be lying,

more beautiful than all the reredos saints

punctuating your way to Santiago.

The war would go on around it, and then the peace;

with April, seed would spring beneath,

and think what Jesse tree would grow,

what progeny inhabit its branches

as you slept on, or walked on past Hornillos,

past Castrojeriz, Calzada del Coto

and lonely Calzadilla; how its leaves’

wave-song would carry to this treeless plain.

Or would you leave all that, tramping westwards

with your hurts left at the roadside crosses

like pebbles picked from one, and left

a fraction lighter for the carrying

at the next? – making sorrow that sand-grain

to set down at Finisterre

unsure by then what part was yours

and what share was another’s.

Meanwhile you’re pointing into shadow,

the first for miles, where the spring rises,

Look you say Honeysuckle, Forget-me-not,

and the ghosts sing back Madreselva,

Nomeolvides; and so, trading name for name,

stripping back the prose to poetry, coining

as the need arises Bloodless Thistle,

Cardo Palido, Estella del Rey, Fantasma

AT THE GRAVE OF BEVERIDGE

What foresight or what irony

settled you on this high plot,

barely soil for burial,

barely place enough for name?

The story is

some sailor brought home cholera

and brought the place to this:

ghost-crofts, graves of houses,

all that makes for civil life

reduced to this green archive.

You’ve chosen well:

all four quarters’ weather serves

to show there is no covenant

time or else rapine

will not prove void.

Here’s fitting monument

to great dreams and their fall:

an open secret,

a turning you would miss

if you weren’t looking for it

FROM THE OUTLYING ISLANDS

They end up at Torcello,

leaving everything behind

-Baedeker, Hemingway,

the ways they now saw

flooding over;

and it's less

the spectacle of judgement

(that glorious damnation,

the endless glamour of the saved)

than, turning east,

the mother's infinite

knowing grief

that sends them back

comforted, or something close

to lose themselves

where the land is just a sliver

and the world is nine tenths blue