AN AITIUIL: AN ANTHOLOGY
with the martello journal
The Magic Road
by isabel miles
No magic wand, no mirrors we can see
but -just like that-
the N3 vanishes without a puff of smoke
transmogrifying to the -wait for it- A46.
And in a flash we cease to travel in kilometres per hour
for all the distances have turned to miles,
like knotted handkerchiefs to rabbits,
Guinness to pale ale.
The sky’s above it all,
indifferent as the hills,
the swans and crows and cows and little crawling things.
It seems this trick is meaningless to every other kind but ours.
And yet the sat nav tells us that we’re in another country,
so it must be true.
We pay in pounds but find the tea and scones taste much the same.
And Lough Erne is as Irish as Lough Gill.
This sleight of hand seems second rate
beside the true enchantment shared by trees
and hills and ancient stones
on either side of this imaginary real line
that disappears as soon as nobody believes in it.
On the road back -Hey presto!-
and the mumbo jumbo is reversed.
Born and raised in a Scottish mining village, Isabel Miles spent thirty years as a scientist before turning writer. Her poems and short stories have been published in Green Ink Poetry, Northwords Now, Shooter, East of the Web, Dreich and Acumen, among others. She is the author of a poetry pamphlet, Spent Earth (Mudfog Press). Her poems have also featured in two anthologies and she has published one novel, Chosen, on Kindle. She lives in the North York Moors