It’s interesting to rummage
around in old folders and notebooks, looking for something useful that might be worth sending
somewhere,
I found myself rolling the
years back – at least ten years, discovering (it felt like that) poems which
were remembered and recognised, but also discovering that they’d changed. Or more accurately, I’d changed. It was still me who wrote them, and they were
still them, but we were both different.
I felt as though I was
travelling upstream on a voyage of discovery – discovery not just of old poems, but of my
earlier self. Here I was – or am – going back in time, when things were younger:
striding against the flow of time, through years that had past.
One poem in particular gave
me a metaphor.
I could see why I’d titled
the poem ‘The Explorer.’
There’s something naturally
attractive about the source of a river, as the great Victorian explorers discovered
(you just have to use that word). And
the poem brought back that feeling of searching, of being on a journey of
discovery.
Of course, this wasn’t an
exploration for something not yet found: others had found it and been there – but
it was fresh and new for me. The source of the Exe appears clearly marked on
the map, but a sense of mystery lingers.
A mature and mighty river, finally over a mile wide, has to
start somewhere: there’s a moment when even the largest of things doesn’t
exist, and then it does. I wanted to find that place, which is
appropriately high and wild.
The little poem returned me.
I remembered the start,
walking gently uphill through good pasture, but soon the grass giving way to
sedge and rushes, with fewer sheep and my awareness of the ground underfoot being
softly full of water. Then the appearance beside the path of a gurgling stream,
becoming smaller, quieter and shallower. And me, walking faster as it narrowed,
anxious not to lose it. Then – with a hesitation or two – it disappearing into
the hillside. The sodden sponge of high
Exmoor no longer able to hold onto this water – out it trickles, and the Exe is
born.
East across to Preyway Meads,
you can see a silver line of what is by now a real river winding away across the moor, calling upon others to join,
into the green meadows of Devon, growing all the while and naming many a place
as it passes on its way, on and on eventually to name the
county’s capital city. Where we happened to once live, and where we started
from.
It’s not only rivers that
change as they grow and age, yet somehow remain the same. So here I am now with
this re-discovered poem that was written by me a long time ago, after my own
journey of discovery – both then, and now.
I don’t think I’ll send it anywhere, but it has been an interesting exploration.
I don’t think I’ll send it anywhere, but it has been an interesting exploration.
The Explorer
Everything has to start
somewhere.
For the first time, I pursued
the grown river upstream.
Of course I found its source
–
easy enough to follow water,
as it becomes younger
time can flow backwards
west into the sun.
Besides, it’s clear on the
map.
Grasses roughen as I climb
ground so full of water
each footfall frees a stream.
Thus certainty is lost.
It narrows, hesitates, then
attracted by the hill is
gone – even as I find
its source, now absent,
but newly discovered.
Across the meads runs
the fresh Exe, in its own
time
growing increasingly known.
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