In a way, this can be viewed as a companion piece to last week’s poem. That was about places never visited through being lost to the map, and maybe existing only in the imagination; this one is about those perfectly well-defined places that we never get round to visiting, perhaps a village off the main road down some high-banked country lanes, briefly wondered about as we drive past at speed, and yet which continue to haunt us with a sense of lost possibilities, rather as the door in the wall haunted the protagonist in the short story by H.G.Wells.

The Signpost

Casgob, it said, 2
miles. But I never went
there; left it like an ornament
on the mind’s shelf, covered
with the dust of
its summers; a place on a diet
of the echoes of stopped
bells and children’s
voices; white the architecture
of its clouds, stationary
its sunlight. It was best
so. I need a museum
for storing the dream’s
brittler particles in. Time
is a main road, eternity
the turning that we don’t take.

R.S.Thomas