Squint, and you can almost imagine it
stretching out as far as any eye can see,
curving unexpectedly round a parcel
of what was farmland, ploughing straight
through that hollow where apartments
once stood, where the old, the weak,
the unlucky lie buried. It lies, like UV light,
just outside the spectrum of what is
visible, this intrusion mapped out on
a screen in an office by a uniformed
clerk who hovers between sullen hostility
and boredom, a diktat you can almost
– not quite – see, can only guess at, intuit,
from stillness broken by a sniper’s bullet,
the casual murder of your neighbour’s
children who yesterday wandered across
this unmarked yellow line in error, looking
vainly for wreckage they could burn.
© Steve Pottinger 6 Jan 2026
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