SPEAKING WITH BIRDS
(This was written just after I had met Wendy and was a reject from one of my chapters in START. I am anxious putting it up here. I think I strained too hard to be creative! But I like that uncertainty we can find in our lives; when we have come out the other side of some sort of trauma; all battered and confused and lost from our old certainties; hoping life can change which, of course, it sometimes can.)
I batter myself into an oasis where the air is calm and the water sweet. Where dust no longer coats me in ashes. I look around me smiling and yet when I reach for the dates of the date palm it is covered with insects and when I walk to the vegetable gardens they recede in front of me until they vanish and when I walk to the tents and the cooking pots I realise that I am living in another country whose customs I have no knowledge of.
I walk on the wet sands with the light of the setting sun reflected in them and I wonder how distant I should be from you all now. I open my mouth to express my feelings and find you all scattering like sand sucked up by a willy waw; laughing down at me from the clouds saying we all live different lives, we have different values. Laughing and saying mount your white steed even though you do not know how to ride and come and rescue a dozen damsels who have no intention of being rescued and who you would shrink from, if their hands fluttered in front of your face proffering daisies and roses. Who say “Come and fight a righteous fight.” though most of you think the straw inside me is flammable and would prefer to use it to make pillows.
I drive along a straight road, sure that there are no turnings and yet I find myself in the mountains bumping along an ice puddled dirt track and I look around me and realise I am out of my depth. That the bright white peak that is my morality is reflected in an ice glazed puddle covering clay waters and that you are all standing awkwardly saying that is where you live; the purity of snow is an illusion.
I board a blue hulled yacht and set off sailing to a distant horizon. Sailing through the cloud ridden night, sucking salt water off my streaming lips and I wait for the sun to sketch a blur of redness on the water; for a lighthouse to break the darkness of the horizon with the white periodic gleam in the clouds and for home to loom as a dark island on the lightening sea. And, as I search for a velvet future, I realise that I am leaving my past behind me, unacknowledged, scattered with ship wrecks and mines that will pop up in the dark seas again and again, making the stars hide behind the clouds and the sun hesitate to rise.
And in the blur of a foggy morning and the ice of a frosty night, in the confusion of pursuing fairy tales, of following the prescribed limits of a journey only I can make. I see your hand reaching out of the mist, your feet helping my ragged feet to dance, your laugh making my sadness gasp at the shock of a rainbow. As I relax, as I think it is ok not to know the past, the future, to live at one remove from the present. I turn over in bed and say to myself;
“Welcome to this oasis, where the water is sweet and the air is calm”
We stand under the palm trees, cuddling each other smiling, though we are worlds apart and we don’t know what food is safe to eat or what path we will take when we embark on the next step of our journey.
And I smile and say “I would not want it any other way”
2013
(Photo: Loch Awe, December 2020)
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