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From the Sofa was a response to a call for poems and stories that encapsulated travel by rail and was inspired as much by imagined travel and discovery as by the region through which the railway passes.
The idea of the peri-urban became of interest to me as a concept and as a term for neither wild countryside nor built up suburbia - but the area between, after hearing it used this way at a conference which was about arts in rural England.
From the Sofa was one of many contributions that formed 'Moving Stories' - an online exhibition organised by the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) as part of the celebrations of 200 years of rail travel by the National Railways Museum, York in 2004. It was also selected for reading at the Association of Writers and Writing Programmes (AWP) conference in Vancouver in 2004.
From the Sofa
You have to have a certificate
To walk the railways
And be not unprepared in toeless shoes
As I was
Walking always at the edge
I never saw a viper out at Strensall
Evading mock battle or wet muzzle
Or at Pickering nor Goathland
As squatters between the holiday homes
Other people have – have homes and have seen them.
Where trains slither out
At Leversham, it’s said
They sun themselves on the platform before the stationmaster’s door
Or drape across the stones between the rails
Basking until it’s too hot
Then raspingly move to shadier spots
Slipping beneath rocks and logs
Breeding writhing and warming
Under the ground in April
Bearing live young
Active , cross-looking and
Snub-nosed with mind your own business eyes.
They lurk, it’s said, on the wall near Len’s Leap
Where, back bent and deaf to the steam train
Sweats and hammers
Hears
Up above the sounds of wind,
metal, trees, yells,
Hoot of train……………..
Steam-slash across winding back and sides
He jumped,
cleared the track,
the verge, the ditch
Was up against the wall
No snake then!
Still every summer there the vipers lie
Rustling
Circling
Breathing
Scuttling
Like hundreds of low lying train spotters
Yet are they out, wild, fierce and alive,
On all my days in?
In my mind they save
Me from my living room
Satisfy my country-urban gaze
Remind me of wilderness
By clutching me
To their snakey hearts
Among the gorse and grass of
Grosmont
Traipsing mini-skirted, painty toed and
Sandaled in slinky slingbacks
Come you switchback slitherers
Come visit, curl this way and hiss
With oh so sofa loving peri-urban me.
Lyn Wait 2004
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