I had the map but all the way I saw
the journey we made last time, the cast iron
signs we followed like a creed, the loose light
that toyed with dyke and hedge till we believed
our right to water, holy or profane,
was divine, like us: we lost our way.

And seeing what I hadn’t seen before,
bog cotton sown when millhands on the cure
coughed their lung-fluff out to the salt clean wind,
and rocks dyed khaki when lads with shredded
shadows throated the iron water to sweat
the trench rats from their pores, seeing them I saw

the smashed well stoop in a nest of hawthorns
and the sinking tin warning: this water’s
unfit for litigious times; but the stream
still split the limestone and light, like hushed-up
stories splinter into every map of now
and mortally thirsty, I arrived, and drank hard.