Guest Poem by Bridget Khursheed

Bridget Khursheed is a poet and geek based in Scottish Borders. She is a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award winner for poetry. Her most recent collection 'The Last Days of Petrol' is available from Shearsman Books. Learn more: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/bridget-khursheed/. This poem is from Acumen 108.

Plotting Doggerland

There are farms you reveal as our plane slides
towards Amsterdam. An ex-navy surveyor
of forgotten seafloor, you have seen
this obscure bombscape drilled into neolithic

geography. Using a digital weather-eye,
submersible and deep dive, you sometimes
– you say – rub sludge to pluck bombs
factory fresh if they are German;

sometimes decay. The uncertain degraded explosive
shares the shoal path in mounds
maybe farmstead midden, eggshell,
antler in the missing oak tree.

At the clearing where once grain was cut soon
mills can farm the air again; it is all
a matter of looking and finding spent explosions.
Were we at the academy together?

A rhetorical question just like
where and when does Europe end?
And why can’t another harvest be
threshed in some untraced shortcut alley.