'SONDER – The realisation that each passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. (The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows).'

​

I read a comment on a travel photos, it was like the beginning of a poem.  Calling out to friends, we have completed the poem.  Each verse is a unique memory, recalled by a different person.  Individually they are unrelated but together they speak of our collective experience of the human condition. The photos used to illustrate this poem have also come from some of those who have contributed.  Being invited into the rich internal worlds of those around me has been a privilege.  I have loved reading them all.  My friend Cheryl Lawrie said recently “I will remind myself that every person sitting across the table from me is a much more complex collection of stories, wisdom and perspective than my impatient and dismissive mind can comprehend.”  

I’m aware of the background behind some of the contributions, but not all.  I like the mystery, it appeals to me. Some have been eager to respond, others have needed coaxing.  Each spoke their truth.  We have voices from: a soldier, clothes designer, lawyer, midwife, journalist, teacher, translator, nurse, artist, hairdresser, youth worker, end of life carer, social worker and a vicar, amongst others.   We have people for whom English is a second language.  We have contributions from a 7 year old through to people in their retirement.  Tiny snatched memories and life changing moments.  Like the Tree of Life, they sing “a song of laughter, a song of tears, a song of beginning and a song of coming home.”.  And so,

​

I was there a long time ago.
There was ice on the waves
And our hair froze.

I sat on the pier steps.

Morning sun, only just warming my shoulders.

I slipped into the sea, alone.

I realised I had knowingly volunteered to be in such a dangerous situation.  I wondered if the worst happened  whether my husband and children would think I was brave,

or hate me for deserting them.

Winter hangs heavy on delicate things.

Time moved forwards, I moved forwards. But you?

You stopped. Still.

Always a part of me but no longer here, growing.

You, who knew nothing but love and my beating heart, are here because I carry you here.

I could barely feel my fingers and toes.

The rain fell
And the tears of loneliness
Remained unseen
And unknown….

Upon the windswept green grass we walked.
About our future son’s name we talked.

And at last it was almost over, I looked for you in the gloom,

you floated up like a star, a tiny doll in the dark.

No noise escaped you but your breath was soft, a soul from before, a returner to this life.

My chin gently grazes your head so softly (hair like velvet, soft and wispy)

I breathe in, you are sleeping, I hold you,

my arms ache.

Dental work and baby poop and logistics but not poetry.

Next time.

I want to run away, but

I’m right where I want to be.

Playing and crunching, orange and copper, the year’s wheel turns

and shows us new beauty.

As a child

An ostrich feather blew across the plains to my feet.

A glimmering hint.

I scanned the horizon and knew:

Ineffable epoch.

He ran with me, right beside my big toothless grin.
He sent me bravely flying, ribbons streaming down that big open road, on two wheels spinning, believing that I could do anything.

Thursday evenings, freshly mowed lawns, evening summer sun and Top of the pops was always on.

Ten flowers sitting in the grass

Watching the lovely rain wash over them

(they loved it)

Whilst lying in my cosy bed, tossing around, thinking of what it is, what It could be,

The night is dark, then I am reassured by the noise of her steps:

my mum.

In a cavernous crowded pub
We shouted, we sang, we necked cheap pints
And kissed in the rain outside
As we turned from children into adults
Learning who we were
Forging in that dark dingy space our bright young hopes and dreams.

Two friends approach the train station draped in feather boas a late night visit to try and woo my future husband.

An inkling that this moment is important and never to be repeated:

On a pick up truck in Uganda, gripping the front bar, wind sailing through my hair, at dusk. Off, impulsively, to visit a friend in a neighbouring village, by myself.

I felt completely free.

The memory anchored by the tall, lean, man with a beautiful face sharing the back ledge of the truck.

And his long eyelashes.

(My sense of freedom ended with a bump when my friend wasn’t there and it was too late to travel back by myself.   I had to stay in a stranger’s mud hut and was a little scared!)

It hurts so much,

not being near you.

I feel the lack of you like a hole in my soul, a fault in my heart, a rend in my spirit.

You are everything to me: you welcomed me, nurtured me, enveloped me, reforged me in your own image.  You, my city, are an inexorable, immeasurable, irredeemable part of me.

A battlefield in driven rain
Achieves cohesion, familial peace.
We fought with solitude and exorcised the strain,
Propelled by puppies and released.

An old photo slips out from a book:

Just as I remember you, Same green dress, same haughty look,

But now – so still.

Push off into the wind to prove that we can.

Run and keep running

Over the cliff until Our feet touch air.  And then spiral down with a sick lurch.

Maybe our time to fly is done…

On the ground floor was an old lift. Its steel doors had the word ‘gâté’ graffitied in French. It meant ‘spoilt’ but I always confused it with meaning broken. Wrapped around the walls was a poor imitation Cézanne mural. The lift petrified me and I always took the stairs, briefly wondering about the person who had painted the mural.

Tattoo was perhaps the finest man I ever met.

He was a junkie and lived in Sao Luis. His face was covered in ink art and he made me a ring from copper wire.

It was one of the best nights of my life.

As I walk alone along a nameless beach late at night,
far on the other side of the world, away from those I love,
I watch as the light dances and glitters within the gentle waves,
and feel the magic that life has to offer and feel a warmth within myself.

I pick a stone carefully, feeling for a smoothness.

Rock slaps water and sinks without a trace.

“My Dad is better at skimming” I think as

shingle crunches underfoot.

It was his first trip to the beach and the air was bitter.
I wanted to savour the memory. But the memory hurts.
Beneath the smile was the hidden pain, beneath the clothes the hidden bruises.
Head to toe the black and blue consume my body.
The obligatory photo in the baby album, another ‘first’.
But it wasn’t a first it was another photo with a smile on my face and pain in my eyes.
The eyes hold the memories, the depth of the pain.
A past that I conquered and found the strength to escape.

Waiting in the dark. The only light is from the cathedral.

Watching people float in and out like little moths caught in its eerie glow.

I hover further back. Just out of the pull of its orbit.

And I wait.

Your acceptance of me.

Seeing my worst, but loving me anyway.

Loving me, but expecting nothing in return

Together in file we moved
Circumambulate around the ancient altar
High up on the summit, embraced between sky and earth

As I walk along the edge of ‘my kinda beautiful’
I look out over the harsh waves of my past.
As the cool salty air hits my face, I feel the warmth of their soft small hands holding mine.
At that moment, I realise that the unknown mystery of my past self, is staring right up at me through those beautiful blue stained windows below.
It’s all there within us all. It’s him, he’s here.

Driving up the mountain pass at sunset.
The mountain top behind us shining with the last of the rosy light – “let me just run up there and catch the last of it”.
The chill wind howling wildly, the sun setting into the sea many miles away and the whole horizon all around glowing.
Coming back down to the car in the twilight, the words resounding in my head –
“to have lived to see such a thing as this is to have been greatly blessed.”

On the Jurassic coast staring outwards across a stretch of shale and shingle spat into the sea.
I remember an old photograph as I watch your figure cut a hole in the sky.
The same stretch of sea the same stretch and bend of arm.
A stone cast skims and resonates in the roaring foam breaking the surface- a rend in time.

my looking back is marked by geography and time
four countries
fourteen addresses
forty years
my looking forward by knowing
home is carried in the heart

Sitting by the fire, waiting to begin

Smelling of soap, paper thin

Skin.

That last day, cold but warm together.

Before the tears.

We laughed, all fears unknown. Just happy.

My shadow runs beside me rippling along the lapped wooden fence.

Something about the shape of the jumper hem and the silhouette of my hair remind me of my dead sister.  The school photos of the two of us are still out from showing to her grandchildren.

I reach up, half-expecting to find a hairslide or a ribbon bow and the voice in my ear says

Well done, you can slow down now ….

Surrounded by garden at night, we feel like we’re far from land,

an island of trees in the middle of the sea.

The engulfing blanket of warmth,

the sounds of twenty million hearts beating

and then

a hundred million suns and stars