Writing

A quiet day at home appealled after a busy weekend and so I have been taking it easy today. I did 5km run after the school run and a nice 1.5 mile walk after lunch but my other tasks have been more muted e.g. clearing the garden up after the weekend, filling the bird feeders, fixing some solar lamps and cooking.

The two photos are from my walk round the goat farm. The grasses look fantastic at the moment, almost seductive. I just want to walk in and lie down in amongst the soft stems with the airy seed heads floating above.

As it happens, I have got back to writing for the first time in a while. Not on the next novel but on poetry as I want to put together a collection of lockdown poems reflecting the locality based on my walks and runs and encounters with different people and events.

The first poem is about crossing from Verwood into Woodlands and I am pleased at the shape it is taking. The main point I want to make here is about the slightly ambivalent feeling there has been regarding visitors to the village. In the first instance I have to say that Woodlands, much as I love living here, isn't a standout place to come to. It's perfectly decent and has some beautiful walks but no more than thousands of other similar places across the country. And yet there was a slight sense that these people who were out walking more due to lockdown were welcome to come but with a certain sense of being put up with rather than embraced, of our special places being held closer to our breasts lest others come and spoil them somehow. 

I don't know why there was that sense of ownership and territoriality, a bit of a reluctance to share almost, all at the same time as recognising there was a need for people to get out and about and opportunities to explore places which were close by but completely neglected until now.

I have tried to capture that ambivalence and slight apprehension in the poem. It isn't finished but I am getting on with it.

Welcome

Beyond the hatches and across the fairways, the ground rises.

At a distance, there stand ditches, softened in time,

Woodland and field, a landscape revealed on high

Where age old guardians, solid like first forged iron

Gaze on beauty in fear, ramparts speared into the good soil.

Here the path, constrained by a broken line of trees, shouldered

By banked greens, narrows to a dark entrance,

The trees bent to a cave opening, a passage inside.

The promised gloom lightens on entry, thicket thinning,

Soft earth muffles sound, mounded like snow.

A gate, solidly green in its coat of mosses, does not fit,

Like the sleeves of a knitted jersey loved onto the arms of a grandchild

Who has grown beyond memory. It lies open, swings easily,

A boundary erased. When once it would have been a stop

The walker now only pauses to view an unexpected sign.

Facing down the visitor, it welcomes guardedly, at once

Boastful and secretive, cautionary in its celebration.