If you can make sense of roundabouts and begin
to think they’re a good way to regulate
the traffic’s polite confusion: this endless warp and weft,
oh land of Volvo and urban 4x4s,
breaking welcome, in Roadchefs, with you.

If you can queue with impatience
virtuously contained in smiles about the weather;
If you can tell the difference between
Tea the meal and Tea the drink and
no longer confuse either with dinner or supper, which in any case
is chippy kebab via Samsung or Nokia
(the differences, apart from spelling, lie in geography, possibly, or class,
which is alive and well - though it’s best not to mention that).

If you can smile at insurance brokered non-life, change resistant,
and survive the entirely nonsensical but absolutely essential
need to prove your place of residence before you may sign the lease;
if you can find your way amongst the hedgerows
and dry-stone walls, the signposts which at 90 degrees to each other
cheerfully proclaim north and south;
if you can find Orion and not be thrown
by his odd angles here or the constant company of clouds;
if you can listen to the birds and not be exiled
because you cannot place their song and lost the ones you could;
if you can be glad of a pale sun; begin to trust the cold will pass,
are moved by the light of courage in a snowdrop.

If you can delve beneath the weight of words
and fail to find a Heathcliff on the moors
or those damned dancing daffodils
and see instead the silenced land, fiction blotted,
and sense faint stirrings of a wilderness beneath,

you’ll wake one day to find that it has shifted, shuffled grumblingly,
but moved and made a little space
for yet another stranger.