Planning application
by Laurence Morris

You would not find the name
of this crime scene on any map,
you would need to read the contours
with hawk-eye focus and only then
might you discern the meadow,
catch a suspicion of the movement
in the loading of the moment
before an upright hare takes flight.

The scything of such gladness
would not feed the dispossessed,
the increase in a rich man’s harvest
merely hardening their path to heaven
as the distortion of the landscape
unfolds itself like an earthquake,
first the sudden shock of violence
and then the hell of aftermath.

The world must be turned, I know.
There is no tax-deductible saving
in a hazy greenwood daydream
of all which might have been,
but still, it must surely require
a very special kind of mind,
to pass through a pastoral dream
and then reach to pour the concrete.

Laurence Morris lives in the north of England, where he works as an academic librarian. His poems have appeared in Confluence, Dodging the Rain, The Broken Spine and 192. Twitter: @ld_morris.

Image by David Mark from Pixabay.