ENTER
CREATIVE CONSULTANCY X EXPERIENCE DESIGN
EXPLORING HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN IMAGINATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY
BY JUSTIN HOPPER
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
Justin Hopper is a writer exploring landscape, memory and myth. Projects have included books such as The Old Weird Albion (Penned in the Margins) and Obsolete Spells (Strange Attractor Press), albums (Chanctonbury Rings and The Path for Ghost Box Records) and the podcast Uncanny Landscapes. He and his family live in East Anglia.
BY JUSTIN HOPPER
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
Justin Hopper is a writer exploring landscape, memory and myth. Projects have included books such as The Old Weird Albion (Penned in the Margins) and Obsolete Spells (Strange Attractor Press), albums (Chanctonbury Rings and The Path for Ghost Box Records) and the podcast Uncanny Landscapes. He and his family live in East Anglia.
BY JUSTIN HOPPER
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
Justin Hopper is a writer exploring landscape, memory and myth. Projects have included books such as The Old Weird Albion (Penned in the Margins) and Obsolete Spells (Strange Attractor Press), albums (Chanctonbury Rings and The Path for Ghost Box Records) and the podcast Uncanny Landscapes. He and his family live in East Anglia.
BY JUSTIN HOPPER
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
When we were young
Not ‘you and I’, but all of us – people;
When we were young,
And the stars, well, the stars… the stars were there.
And the birds. And the stones.
Many a stone – they were there, too.
And we piled up stones as we went about the land,
rearranging them as we came and went,
Into middens, and then mounds, and then temples,
And, soon enough, into motorways, service stations
And signs for ‘Town Centre’ or ‘The North’.
And today, sometimes, still,
When the coordinates range right,
Sometimes, still, we can see them -
The mounds and middens,
By the side of the motorway.
Sometimes, still, even now
We follow the mounds
When we really ought to know better.
Through the corn stubble, and over a soft hill to a rickety bridge that crosses over nothing. Well, not ‘nothing’, just, there’s no water there. It’s like a brook on a map. Just a line. Past that, and under the watchful eye of a red kity – probably two – you’ll get to the shoulder of a motorway.
From there, it’s back again. There’s no crossing that thing. It’s fast. Constant. Now this – this is where the bridge should be. But instead, the path just… ends.
Over stretches of just-about-imaginable time such a rushing river of automobiles could result in new species of beetles and bugs evolving on either side the motorway. Charismatic megafauna on one side will stare, drooling, at those on the other, knowing that the risks of crossing for the hunt are greater than those of hunger.
The path, of course, continues on the other side. It’s generations older than the road. If we were faery folk, we’d curse the men who placed their road over ours. Cut us off from the other side. Maybe – maybe we are? Maybe we did? But I don’t know. I think we’re out of curses. All used up. A dry well. Perhaps the people on the other side still know one?
For us, it’s just a ritual to walk these paths to nowhere. Nowhere, that is, unless you need to dump a tyre, or find a rabbit-bone for your cauldron. And it’s a common ritual. There are footprints. Broken ground. Initials, freshly carved into the broken handrail of the wooden bridge.
And here I am. I’ve joined them. Walking back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
As a child, I dreamt that I was shown a magical way of holding my hands. A kind of mudra. A twisting of the wrists. And if I did it exactly right, I could fly.
And the dream was so real, I tried and tried for days to twist myself into this composition.
Sometimes, even now, when I stand in the corner of a field, it seems real again. I clasp my hands together, hold my breath, and wait for the ground to dissolve away.
And it’s like that with the stray sod: a patch of earth which, if trod upon, leads you astray and baffles the senses. Pixie-led. You know the way. You know which path to follow. Yet it’s no longer the same. Your hallowed ground is now cursed. Your road, twisted in knots.
Step on the stray sod and no matter how well you know the way, you’ll sooner be in heaven than at home.
We’re like moths that fly by day. Not properly to be called moths, yet certainly nothing that could sink into other bounds. We flit from field to field, street to street; we bounce off of the corners even as the vastness of the world stretches before us.
We sit between sea and sky yet claim to see no blue. Maybe we should try something else? Something so old, it’s new again? Some fresh tableau? It’s a struggle to breathe sometimes, caught as we are between ocean and air, never entertaining the idea of either blue. We bounce from corner to corner, like moths, never coming to rest.
The next ones, younger than us, they will learn to live in the edges. Instead of neither, perhaps they can learn to be both.
The path makes the world.
The path is the world.
The path makes the world.
It makes us all.
The path makes me.
It's all that I am anymore.
Standing in the corner of the pub,
in my chrysalis,
It all becomes crystal clear:
The moths are all gathering here
And they begin to dissolve.
I can see it happening before me.
They’re tempted in by the dim glow of the fire
Refracted through a dimpled glass.
The shallow laughter, the raised voices,
The prods and pokes of temptation;
The sounds of doomed pleasure still bounce off the walls
Of this hollow spot.
Everyone’s going. Or gone.
--
I can see a lightning bolt seep into the carpet while a woman in her scarlet Sunday finest risked a kerosene caress; the handprint fading on the wall where a rumpled suit realised he could no longer stare; a flutter in the air where the barman turned quickly away from the men and women of nowhere as they dissolved at the ‘last orders’ bell; I can see moonbeams through the window; a change is coming – not on the wind, but in the still.
The real moths are still out there, somewhere. Unseen.
The night moths.
I met my love in those streets. In the days before the great fleeing. We learned them as we learned each other – maps that beamed ever brighter as we grew. Once, I could’ve led a crowd through that maze in thickest fog. I could take my charge with surety and speed through the ferocious black that night there brings.
And then it all changed. I counted my steps as I always had. This time to fall against brick and mortar. Nothing could restore my composure. I prayed, I damned, I clutched my St Christopher and turned my coat inside out.
But it was all changed. All gone. My love was gone, my senses, my self. In broad daylight, nonetheless ferocious night. So I fled. We all fled.
We fled here. And here, now, it happens again.
There is no reasoning with the faery path. One step into the stray sod and you’re committed to the cause. It’s not, ‘some other world’, just another viewpoint. Instead of what it is, I saw the whole and the always of what once had been.
I stepped in the wrong spot. An ‘X’ instead of an ‘O’. And felt the cool chill of a late-Autumn’s evening in the hot sun of a midsummer’s day.
Each byway of a byway; each doddering old wood; each patch upon patch mocked my sense of direction and shook my map.
Where neat rows of corn were bisected by the path for mile upon mile, now I saw patchworks of motley fields dotted with trees and criss-crossed at every angle.
Hours passed and I quit. Gave in. Lay down in the dirt of a bee-loud glade. The skylark’s song, obscured into background. And the chill subsided. And I took refuge. Drifting to sleep. Among the leaf-shadows.
I walk this muddy island in circles.
How else to cross this tidy patch?
But over and over, again and again,
Screwing down into the trudge and path?
You won’t find me now gazing up forever into the clouds.
You won’t find me now staring at the petal on a flower.
You won’t find me now in the flatlands picture-framed
Or the wild mountain that cannot be tamed.
No, you may hear me beside the roar of concrete and speed
One hundred miles of highway straight into the sea.
Or through the bluebell-strewn wood
Riotous in Spring but vanished by the plough.
And if, someday, you, too, find yourself on the stray sod
Wandering far from your circle,
Remember this, that I have learned:
It’s the path has made ya who you are.
And it’s the path, too, that can take it away.
Text Justin Hopper published by Belbury Music
From the album The Path by The Belbury Poly on Ghost Box Records
Buy the album here.
Justin Hopper is a writer exploring landscape, memory and myth. Projects have included books such as The Old Weird Albion (Penned in the Margins) and Obsolete Spells (Strange Attractor Press), albums (Chanctonbury Rings and The Path for Ghost Box Records) and the podcast Uncanny Landscapes. He and his family live in East Anglia.