Feature > Poetry

Esther Morgan

Esther Morgan's three collections are published by Bloodaxe Books, UK. Her third, Grace, was shortlisted for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize. She has studied and taught at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, and currently lives in rural Norfolk with her husband and young daughter.

Lines of Desire

As faithful as mosques or cathedrals
these paths of our own making
which go unrecorded by the official maps;

which cut the corners of sports fields and recreation grounds,
the public patches of green that piece together
council housing estates and retail parks;

which open up gaps in the thorniest hedges;
which ignore the planners' right angles of tarmac;
which refuse to go round.

Seen from the sky they show up
as paler scars worn into the grass,
less by the passage of footsteps

than that of the heart,
taking the shortest route between where we are

and where we want to be.