9 July, 2006
Idly browsing through my “AUTHORED” folder (which is all I ever seem to do with it these days) on Amaunet, my lovely still-smelling-new MacBook, I came across the following poem.
It was actually the date that caught my eye - 7th July 2003, exactly two years before the London bombings. I was vaguely aware of what was in it before I opened it. In fact I even quite clearly remember sitting in Duke’s Meadows in Chiswick on the baking hot Summer day when I wrote it - my last lazy Summer holiday, having left university the month before.
As I kept reading, I was surprised by how simply it managed to sum up everything I’d been feeling in the last few days in reaction to the first anniversary, and what I thought was an attitude to life I’d developed only over the past year (quite unconsciously stark in my recent 100 words). Life endures, and by its tiniest of moments.
I can’t write poems anymore. My brain just doesn’t seem to work that way now. I hardly seem to write at all in fact. The environment never seems quite right, nor the time.
But I’m working on that. I’m working on that big time…
Meadow
So long as this place will always be here -
this pure unspoilt meadow that wants to be endless;
these great ferns tickling
the sunbeam heavy cumulus,
spilling heat onto baked earth;
the riverside benches in their intimate glades;
the distant bonfire and its cloudbound plumes;
chatter of chaffinches
and father and son at play,
and from so high above the splay
of transparent fingers from that brilliant burst of light,
perched regal in infinite cities of blue, silver and white,
caressing all of this in a sigh,
where even each grass carries
a graveyard reverence for a place
where nothing has ever died -
So long as this place will always be here,
Death’s vulgar tools -
his sterile words and antiseptic air -
will be lost in the breeze, and the breeze’s sigh.
There will be no death.
There will be just time.
So long as this place will always be here
I am still a child on holiday
from being anything else.
I will always be here,
and I do not feel alone.
