Beyond Despond1
Faithful pilgrim - walk the Warden’s way
across the golf-course despond and ascend
It’s steep, demanding, but rewards
energy spent and burden borne
Reach top and field and space to pause
Once there, commune and sing and strum
Sing loud and sweet and creatures come
and wait outside the fire’s ring
until they are invited in
They need the rhythm, need the rhyme
need earth beneath, need tune and time
they joined our we - and as one we
thus on we go beneath the sky:
A dance begins, all smoke and steam,
through all of we spoke voices green
that told us truths we deep-down knew –
- still revelations, through and through -
To find the lost, to ground the vain -
we must connect, again, again
To lift the louring town-sogged mind -
with sky-hill-light we radicalise
Beaten-teen-spirit, fogged with blood -
we cleanse with sun and honest mud
Then dropped the vision, slept the we
in puppypile-style - free
Then sun-salute and stretch the back . . .
Now! Down the hill! Sack Rome! Look back . . .
1A highly figurative account of how a group of friends, me among them, took guitars and cider and a long walk across town to climb Warden Hill in the heat of the summer of ’91. We played and sang and some people we didn’t know heard and came and joined us and we carried on until we all fell asleep in a big puppypile and it didn’t rain and we rose with the sun and walked home changed. We knew we could do this now, on our own and for ourselves, and it felt bloody marvellous. On top of that, it plays a bit of lazy, ill-considered, mischief with Bunyan, who was a sort-of-local boy.
Beyond Despond - Lee Nelson
