Church Path Poem by C Richard Miles

I know a route where now no traipsing traveller trails,
Between the red-brick, red-faced prefab bungalows
And seamy semis, shamed and scorned by snooty stares
Of mouldering mansions, precious, pompous, haughty halls.

Amidst the time-worn terraces, Victorian built
That housed the working folks in Finchley’s humbler days
Who lived in lanes from High Road down to Nether Street,
The pathway walks its walled-in, wandering ways.

Behind the busy bustle of suburban streets,
The disregarded, dingy, charmless Church Path plods
Its squalid, solitary trail, and then retreats
Unseen, unnoticed by the rushing, thronging squads.

They keep themselves constrained on highway’s headstrong course
Crammed close they, in unseeing, unwashed cars, prefer
To snub the lowly, littered lane, whose iron walls
Hem claustrophobically the wary wayfarer.

But in the past, when common land lay all around,
The path stood proud across the unkempt, unscythed sward
Where callow infantry rehearsed their warfare loud,
Releasing cannonball and mortar at a word.

Then corps of corpses crossed the pastured plain;
Pallbearers plodded painfully the well-trod track
To carry coffins home to rest and to remain
And mourners trooped, morose, their tearful, tired trek back.

Those were the days Church Path had its intended use
To steer saved sinners’ souls to sanctuary and God.
It stills remembers glory, though we casually choose
To take the short cut where those unknown saints once trod.