Flight
see these lines across the sky
defiantly marking passage
through nothingness
souls encased in metal & hope
held aloft by physics & Rolls-Royce,
prayer & a need to defy nature
absurdity & logic
I burn to be that plane,
that air, the vapour even -
droplets dispersing, condensing vastly
yet seeming no more than chalk marks
on a limitless blue board
going somewhere
charted
[ My mind still feels as though it is gradually slipping out of my head - as indicated by dodgy, self-indulgent, poetic blog effort - but the few days away must have done some good. I mean, they must have, mustn't they? Mountains and sea and nature: they are all soul food, of sorts, aren't they?
I grew up in a very flat landscape. Mountains are tumultous, indicating vast historic volvanic eruptions, friction between tectonic plates, valleys carved by slow, grinding glaciation... They are revolutionaries, standing up for action and still maintaining aggression and aspiration. The landscape I grew up in was that of a soft, slow accretion of the sea bed- mud encasing and preserving shells, skeletons and secrets, gradually swallowing-up all that rests there and keeping it blanketed, hidden and dark. And flat - sometimes the land and the sky merged, sometimes the horizon and the sea were indistinguishable and you could feel exposed just by standing up. I don't have the sharpness, nor the trapped fire of someone raised in mountainous terrain. I have the wariness and weatherbeaten nature of someone constantly exposed to the wind and sky...
I suppose, this is a long-winded way of saying in some small way - and for the first time in ages - I am feeling homesick. But with no family left in the city where I grew up, where is home? And why am I suddenly feeling a need for the endless flatness I used to want to escape?
Maybe I need another holiday...]
2 comments:
Death leaves Us homesick, who behind,
Except that it is gone
Are ignorant of its Concern
As if it were not born.
Through all their former Places, we
Like Individuals go
Who something lost, the seeking for
Is all that's left them, now—
Home isn't who lives there, or even where it is, but the soft nest of memories and emotions that let us lay down, rest, and heal. So home is wherever you are drawn by nostalgia, or wherever you can build that nest for a while.
Maybe you are drawn back to the thing you most wanted to escape before because you are no longer so restless as to need the escape; or maybe it's because you need to escape something now, and need connection to the energy of escape from so long ago.
Lovely blog, by the way.
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