Namings
Bedford

Years ago,
bed design was perfected.
Reasons were spun for wheels:
sending from carpenter to customer,
obsessive room re–arrangers,
rocking bouncy kids to sleep.
Early beds had standard wheels.

Unfortunately,
young couples,
as young couples do,
experienced runaway passion,
forgetting to put the handbrake on.
Beds bounced about,
buckshotting walls, canoning furniture,
rocketing lamps, smithereening china.

Makers shrunk the bed wheel size,
making transportation hard.
Convoys of beds,
raced across the countryside,
became rare.

The difficulty was water.
In those days,
few rivers had bridges.
Goods with normal wheels
transversed fords.
Beds were now ferried,
increasing costs.

So those rare places
with very shallow fords
and a smooth river floor
afforded more.
Such fords were found
across rock–landscape rivers,
and nowhere else,
except in West Anglia.
A merchant town grew up,
named for the merchants’ luck:
Bedford.