Stephen Robertson

Slanting Lines

A poem for free

            The night mail rattles north to the border

            (bringing the cheque and the postal order).

            Rhythmic verses with echoed refrain

            in the rhythmic clattering noise of the train.

            Childhood journeys by rail come back

            to my memory, patterns of clickety-clack.

But that was then.  Now the rail joints are welded, and the dominant sound

is continuous and high-pitched.  The borders we cross are eastward:

under the channel and then from France to Belgium.

But we don’t notice them at all: the journey is seamless

and, in truth, a little dull.

From Brussels by local train to Ghent: canals and cobbled streets

and beer and chocolate shops

and churches, churches, churches

and buildings that turn out not to be churches.

Wonderful mechanisms in the civic belltower—

a giant musical box.

            There once was a poet in Ghent

            Who set out with the best of intent

            In rollicking verse

            On a galloping horse—

            But Aix was as far as he went.

In Friday Market square

Jacob van Artevelde makes an expansive gesture

towards the setting sun.

Go west, young man?  No, this is about

a century and a half before Columbus.

He is a leader of Flemish weavers, pointing the rest

towards their major source of trade:


Back the way we came.

All verse is born free.