The sky is vast

and oppressively bright.

The birds are screaming at each other again.

Barking about their branch.

It just sounds pretty 

in the gleam of mid-afternoon.

These flat fields stretch on forever;

a thousand steps gets you a yard 

and every mile of solid marching

the same angry voices from the trees persist.

The countryside is at war.

 

This land is cursed somehow.

Thick with panic,

jittery urgency,

grasping at nettles and biting on the brambles in the hedgerow.

A kind of English madness.

A kind of fever dream.

A possession by ideas.

 

Held captive by a tradition;

a stand-off against the sky and the

whispering ground and thicket.

A bloody determination,

to claim to be beholden to neither.

To deny each their power.

Held static in the paper thin film

in between.

Twirling and raging 

and singing 

and shouting.

We, the defiant 

dimwit 

children of nowhere.