Walking through Icomb

Walking through Icomb

Travis Wright

A worn backlight treads light on a field whose dirt flew north
under foot today, two spiny trees and a brambly ditch
between us, the whole sight over-white with snow, and a sun
that sits thick overhead in the haze, locked in a vault.
Nothing is normal that happens here: my boot tracks, the rutted
paths, your voice on the wind. Drystone walls lead with odd
looks: even the dead land never knew us. In Icomb fields,
we have no names. The land is margin in the moral country
of our youth: home without history, birth, but not ancestry,
drifting between days, the hope that it too would be healed.

---

Travis Wright
Poet & Academic

Travis Wright is a poet based in Raleigh, where he lives with his wife and children, and teaches. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and he was a Junior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. His chapbook, A Woodland Lexicon, is forthcoming from Little Gidding Press.

Photography by Shana Van Roosbroek