Tank Tracks

Tank Tracks

Flinty chalk path

Hard under foot

Hard under my feet

My painful feet

Follow it South to the brow of the wheat field

Shimmering in the surprisingly chilly breeze

On this cosmically hot day

A day so hot it feels portentous

Why have you never bothered to come here before?

You’re too late to see the Churchill tank

I know you’ve taken this path

Past the leaving path-blockers

(a theory you’re developing)

And down into the history of military training exercises

But you’re too late

What do you mean?

Look I’m on top of it?

It’s here it says so on the map

And here too on my smart phone.

Churchill tank

So you look for further directions

Scrolling down on the downs

You find an article in the West Sussex County Times

Explaining how this treasured landmark

Becoming increasingly overgrown

Disappearing back into the landscape

Rusting into the ground

Providing a direct route to the real people

Who sacrificed everything

Who gave it all

Has been transported to France

The Norfolk family estate explain their reasons

You read on the screen up on the downs

The tank is going to be restored

And placed in an Imperial War museum in France

Your eyes alight on the picture of the red rusting hulk

You hold it up to the landscape

Snuggled into the wheat field on your phone screen

a skeletal abandoned piece of farm machinery

Looks like a litigation waiting to happen

I mean children and hikers might well

Well you know

But any way you’re too late any how

It’s gone to be restored

So that moment when it all clicks

And you know that the land you are treading on

With your painful feet

Is the very same path

That led to undoubted tragedy

Will have to come from inside you

But it’s not in there and it never was

Because it’s out there - that feeling

So let the visitors enjoy the placard

Explaining how before them is a newly restored Churchill tank

Which had once stood abandoned on the Sussex Downs.