Lucky Dip Number 14
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In Evening Light
As evening shades into night the shapes in the garden in this quiet suburban cul-de-sac assume simpler bolder outlines. The towering woodland trees, young saplings fourteen years ago when my wife and I first visited, are deceptive in their stillness and the remedial night is full of the sounds I know I cannot hear. The moth and the bat the barn owl and the vole keep their tryst and to its lair the fox will return to feed its young for in the ecology of the earth the unreflective life of the woodland is so much more important than I. Four dimensions including time encompass reality as we experience it but even with another seven curled incomprehensibly small quantum physics struggles to describe all that there is as too with those dimensions within ourselves that we can never truly comprehend yet which give to our lives their profoundest meaning. Thus some forty years ago in my early thirties I perforce faced the unfathomed within me when painfully perturbed by violent events then unfolding in my native province in Ireland. To relieve my feelings I wrote some poems then for the first time since my teens or rather some poems wrote me and six weeks ago I returned to writing as a poem* came unbidden to my mind after a bee had brushed my face and disturbed and startled me and I wrote - .. if life disturbs me should I allow the disturbance to show me a new place? .. I cannot know what life holds in store in these generous twilight years, but the welcome disturbance I now feel comes not from any external event but from a poetic urge within. So I said to my soul be still be still and be deceptive in your stillness. |
* The Bee
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