Ode to a Road: A poem for the M25

From Westerham to Caterham

I never got my kicks

Till I found myself at Blindley Heath

by way of Exit Six

For no artwork has the beauty

And no symphony I know

Like the shards of autumn sunlight

On a two-mile contraflow

Or the roadcone-hurling Queequegs

Dressed in luminescent green

On a tailback close to Rickmansworth

By Exit Seventeen

It roars for all eternity

It's horrid wet or dry

But the thirty-nine enquiries

Failed to find the reason why

For the dreaming gabled hamlets

Double-glazed against the noise

Close to Exit Twenty Seven

As you go to Theydon Bois

And you will not find a driver

Who can claim he's been alive

Till he's drunk deep of the liquor

That they call the Twenty Five

Martin Newell