Another Route to Return

 

Sometimes I go back, return just before dawn

to those narrow lanes we’ve long left behind,

those ancient town gates, rough-hewn cobblestones,

the modern boulevards, landscaped and tree lined.

 

The sharp edges of stones underneath my sole,

the whispers of water, wind and centuries,

the long stories that shaped them, told and retold,

the smells of growing grass and flowering trees.

 

I don’t know if it’s I who moves through those streets

or it’s the dreams and stories that move through me

like wind and water, milestones beside my knees,

plumes of grasses in autumn, shells from the sea.

 

A recurrent dream that keeps me wide awake,

it moves through me sometimes just before daybreak.

The way things are shaping up this year - I feel like returning instantly, burrowing back to places and times in the past. 

Though I am emphatically not one of those people who automatically view it with good old days type nostalgia. Old is often not gold, far from it. Go back fifty years, only 60% of women were literate. Go back a hundred, tuberculosis was a death knell. Another 25 years, there were no indoor loos for the majority, poor sanitation killed people. Mortality rates among infants and children were unbelievable. No hot water on tap, no gadgets, everything done with huge amounts of elbow grease. Life was hard. 

Yes, the past is great to romanticise and write poems about, but not so great to return to in actual fact. On second thought, I'm good where I am, thank you. :) Still fretting about the weather, both literal and metaphorical and about the roughness all round. But also grateful for a whole heap of things.