sleep walking

all your life you have been sleep walking wandering in a dream all your days faking it for real now through the fog you stumble and wake upon an unknown shore feet unsteady and uncomfortable feeling it for real looking around the unfamiliar landscape no landmarks to guide you and then you look down at your feet and wonder

?where have you been?where are you?where will you go?

expanding

warrior of light

Repeated experiences have but one aim, to teach us what it is we do not want to learn.
- adapted from Paulo Coelho.



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Paulo Coelho

leaving ithaca

Rain fall tropple,
Dipple, dopple,
Drupple, drapple.
Fall down, down, down.

Water fall down,
Over earth rising,
Boulder bank breaking,
Bedded earth rising.
Flow down, down, down.

To switching sands of shores uncertain,
To seas of strange and untrusting
Waters deep; deepened by our tears of woe
But then to go
Toward on high
Where clouds will fly onward home
From whence to roam and roam again
To wherever where, whenever when
Sometime soon we’ll meet again,
Somewhere where, some when, when.


A recent posting on still life ...with life reminded me of this effort from 12 years ago, so I decided to post it here.

I wrote this after visiting a friend who was attending Cornell in Ithaca, upstate New York. Ithaca's surroundings are dramatically cut by beautiful gorges and this probably prompted the water theme which I combined with an old favourite of mine, the theme of return. Although there are no direct references to Odysseus I was thinking of his return home to that other Ithaca in Greece after his travels.

Inventing words can come across as a naive pursuit and I'm not sure they fully work here but I have decided to leave the poem in the original November 1995 form. I also probably should apologize to Gerard Manley Hopkins as this is one of a few poems that has been influenced by his writings.


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ithaca, usa
ithaca, greece
still life ...with life
gerard manley hopkins
inversnaid