TWO POINTS OF VIEW

'The Toyota in cruise, I sit watching the land
from the motorway's comfort roll out its display
to the comforting croon of my Classic FM
(is it Pachelbel's Canon or Brahms' Requiem?)
For a while eyes and nose are borne gently past hay,
then I zoom through jade-green, and my spirits expand.
The hedges processing from ash tree to oak
weave their briers with visions, their hawthorns with dreams;
an embankment soon hides them, is purple with vetch;
now a fugitive wood where the southerlies stretch
hurries by in its skirt of contorted hornbeams
by an old rutted farm with uncurling wood smoke.
And I say to myself as I ride,
"What sublimely unspoilt countryside!"'

'All I hear is the whoosh, all I see is the blur
of the lorries and cars on their mission of fools;
and their fumes hang above them and gently excrete
into woodland and meadow a poisonous gleet.
The verge bristles with needles and empty ampoules,
and the hornbeams are dying, the hawthorns astir
with a rustling of plastic, prayer banners of death,
while my rutted old farm in its gabled despair
can no longer remember its ghosts. And the oak
and the ash tree are dumb; hydrocarbon fumes choke
the hill breezes, infecting the pestilent air.
Hear the roar of those engines and smell their dead breath.
And I say to myself as I stand,
"What a wantonly vandalised land!"'