Sacred City (Ode to Milton Keynes)

[EileenGreay]

The town is square and grey, an altar cloth
in open fields. A boulevard divides
the rising and the setting sun. The hill
which rooted Joseph's staff may not be here,
but Nature's sweets and idols are. A witch
I kissed one Summer's night is bearing bread
and stones. I watch her through a pub window.
Her rites are held in tree preserves, where love
and leaves are one with light, each soul a part
of Earth's design. I kissed her there, beneath
a stooping tree. She laughed and lost my name.
I walked to work the next morning with grief.
A fleeting lust, a sudden warmth, a tree
behind us, old and stooped, yet now this grey.

This is excellent, really excellent. The metre works splendidly - very elegant. An interesting city to write an ode to. I've only passed through Milton Keynes a couple of times: a bizarre place with those huge long roads - one might say the world reimagined as a supermarket.

What I particularly love here is the framing of the poem by greyness - the bleak opening image (and beautifully expressed metaphor of the altar cloth) giving way to a sense of the city coming to life, before returning to greyness. The only thing I could possibly suggest to change is a tiny thing - perhaps replace the final comma in the final line with a semicolon? Really tiny, but I feel that the return to grey needs a bit more of a pause. A semicolon would really make the reader think about that sudden return.

In the beautiful little love story I hear lots of references - not sure if you were conscious of connections to Keats' La Belle Dame or Yeats' 'Down by the sally gardens' while you were writing this, but I certainly think they're there.

A beautifully crafted poem. Only one more thing: I love this fourteen line version, recalling in a spatial and metric sense the sonnet, but this left me wanting more (perhaps that's part of its charm!). If you felt like looking at it again, I'd love to read an expanded version. But really there is very little to criticise here - well done.