The following Michael Donaghy poem is from The Times Literary Supplement 14 August 2009, a review by Graeme Richardson of two Donaghy books:

………………Meridian…………….

There are two kinds of people in the world.
Roughly. First there are the kind who say
“There are two kinds of people in the world”
And then there’s those who don’t.

Me, I live on the borderline,
Where the road ends with towers and
searchlights,
And we’re kept awake all night by the creak
of the barrier
Rising and falling like Occam’s razor.

A meridian is longitude’s great circle arcing through Earth’s north and south poles, separating, at any given instant, day from night, or it’s the apex of development that lasts for an instant before decline begins, or it’s noon, when the sun reaches its zenith, passing after an instant to a later time, though this meaning is hardly used by anyone anymore. But you may remember it as Michael Schwerner’s civil rights base, Meridian, Mississippi, the place where he was returning with James Chaney and Andy Goodman the night he was murdered in 1964, in an instant, by the Klan.

For Donaghy, a meridian is a “borderline, / Where the road ends with towers and searchlights,” a place where judgments are cut by those who know the difference between those who know what they know and those who don’t, manning the towers, searching the borderline for shadows cast by those burdened by complexity.