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  • I was inspired to find this again after reading the thread started by lucky7 - the best poem I have ever read about cycling, and the experience of cycling, and if anyone can read it and not feel like they want to get out there on two wheels - well, they've probably never learned to ride a bike.

    Does anyone else have any favourite bits of cycle writing?
    ---

    The Cyclist (by Louis Macneice)
    Freewheeling down the escarpment past the unpassing horse
    Blazoned in chalk the wind he causes in passing
    Cools the sweat of his neck, making him one with the sky,
    In the heat of the handlebars he grasps the summer
    Being a boy and to-day a parenthesis
    Between the horizon’s brackets; the main sentence
    Is to be picked up later but these five minutes
    Are all to-day and summer. The dragonfly
    Rises without take-off, horizontal,
    Underlining itself in a sliver of peacock light.

    And glaring, glaring white
    The horse on the down moves within his brackets,
    The grass boils with grasshoppers, a pebble
    Scutters from under the wheel and all this country
    Is spattered white with boys riding their heat-wave,
    Feet on a narrow plank and hair thrown back

    And a surf of dust beneath them. Summer, summer —
    They chase it with butterfly nets or strike it into the deep
    In a little red ball or gulp it lathered with cream
    Or drink it through closed eyelids; until the bell
    Left-right-left gives his forgotten sentence
    And reaching the valley the boy must pedal again
    Left-right-left but meanwhile
    For ten seconds more can move as the horse in the chalk
    Moves unbeginningly calmly
    Calmly regardless of tenses and final clauses
    Calmly unendingly moves.


    Right, I'm off to work now (on my bike)

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