As inaccessible as Eden

An afterthought on yesterday's post: motorway poetics is not an entirely new genre. A couple of years ago Simon Armitage published a chapbook called The Motorway Service Station as a Destination in its Own Right, which I haven't managed to get hold of yet. Charles Tomlinson has also written a number of motorway poems, including this one, 'From the Motorway':

Gulls flock in to feed from the waste

They are dumping, truck by truck,
Onto a hump of land three roads
Have severed from all other:
Once the seeds drift down and net together
This shifting compost where the gulls
Are scavenging a winter living,
It will grow into a hill - for hawks
A hunting ground, but never to be named:
No one will ever go there. How
Shall we have it back, a belonging shape?
For it will breed no ghosts
But only - under the dip and survey
Of hawk-wings - the bones of tiny prey,
Its sodium glow on winter evenings
As inaccessible as Eden ...