Wednesday 24 November 2021

Undreamed Of

                                                          Bal Maidens - Cornwall


                                           

The first lines of D H Lawrence's poem "Terra Incognita" reads - "There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of/vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps."

I set myself a ten minute writing exercise with "Undreamed Of" as my starting point. 

Those blinkered pit ponies that my paternal grandfather cared for down in the pitch black, both he and them released onto the mountains for just two weeks of the year. The Bal Maiden bonnet that his daughter wore as she crushed the copper from rocks in all Cornish weathers.

How to come up from the dark? How to  see through the wide angle lens of life when your eyes are sealed with your fate? How to rise from the ash and the dust? How to rid the mouth of the bitter bile, to find a voice in the the turmoil of survival, while grinding a living from the bones of dead matter.

Who was it that said dream small but live large? 

Undreamed, unlived - that's the way to madness. 

A woman grasps the edge of her kitchen sink as the grey waste water drains away, and says, "I regret..."

Come up from the dark. Come in from the cold. Come forth into at least some sort of light that flashes and cracks the bulbs of despondency.

No to the pinhole camera of a life. In obscura.


3 comments:

  1. Lovely to see the poem here, resonating with your ancestors and all those that wear away their lives in toil,and yet they hear the blackbird sing and watch the scudding clouds. Or was it all too unrelenting to notice? Thanks for posting.

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  2. Thanks for your encouragement, Carole. It would probably not be up here if not for you.

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  3. And lovely to see (hear?) your writing again. My grandfather looked after pit ponies too and in what was a cruel irony went blind himself. He was the strongest (in every sense) and yet gentlest man I've ever known.
    We all have regrets, it's how we carry them which matters.

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