Leaving the girdered canopy of Lime Street
We trundle the tracks of history.
Through tunnelled stone and rock
Red and yellow, grimed
And peopled with primitive caves
Slanted cuts give way to mossy ferns
As we reach the edge of the hill.
Caught between Railfreight and Avanti
Technology traces our route
From past to future
As the ticket collector arrives.
Leafy and bushy
This must be the Branch line
Cuttings made by the hands
Of our great great grandparents
Lead to peaceful suburban gardens.
Bushes and flats, bushes and flats
Pointed red roofs on white-walled vistas
Fir-dotted park land
Innovation towers on the horizon.
New and old face each other over the rails
God smiles across the tracks
From the corner of the farthest window.
Star-painted storage
Golden arches and buzzing bingo
As the city yawns and begins to stretch its legs.
Purple-pink railway lupins
Freckle the green
Track-sides wooded over.
What lives hide there?
Lea Green is field green
Chequered with yellow stalks
The train fills its lungs in the open air
Crackling past pylons and power transformers.
Yellow and white railed stairs
Zig-zag up and down
To the wood-lined suburbs of the float-glass capital.
Woods become forests
Allotments, smallholdings and farms
As the Gypsies wave from their caravans
And layered time unfolds.
Through the redbrick terraces the train threads its way.
As our journey ends; its is onward
To another City that used rail and steel and cotton
To build it, now a new gateway to the world.
¹ A Metropoem is a way of writing a poem devised by French Oulipian poet Jacques Jouet. The basic rules are that you write only whilst in the station – each verse represents one stop on the journey – and you compose, in your head, whilst travelling. What you write is the poem – no revisions are allowed. This works well on the Paris Metro, where shops are evenly spaces around 2 minutes apart, and station stops are one minute.
² With Garance Marechal I developed an adaptation for research purposes, and then another one to work on overground trains with less regular and even segments.
We ran this live on a 10 stop section of the historic line between Liverpool and Newton-le-Willows as part of the British Science Festival. But before the event, we had to do a commissioning run to make sure thatbthe method would work. This poem is the result, exactly as created live.
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Image by PA