The bridges I crossed with aching legs
A head torch reflecting in tiny stars
And the oceans I crossed, and the beaches
I landed on, sandy and bustling
With people on beach towels
And sancastles built with buckets and spades,
And then there’s the streets
That I’ve lived on and loved.
I’ll write about all those places that seared
A shape in my heart for a life to be lived.
I visited a friend a couple of weeks ago, and the house that they had bought belonged to a retired doctor. He sold the house as seen, and so it came with a whole library of books- and a lot of them were poetry.
I happened to be doing my Thames Path run a couple of weeks later and when I was going through an old volume when I stumbled upon a poem about Henley on Thames. It was beautiful and it really summed up a place that I think has got a place in my heart.
I’ve been to so many wonderful places that seem so ordinary and I feel we all need to write about these places so that they get appreciated for what they are. They may not be Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon, but they are quietly wonderful. Let’s show more love to these places.
Much Love
Rachel xx
Margot Kinberg
I couldn’t agree more, Rachel! Even if it’s the local chippy or a park across the street or….., it has meaning – personal meaning. And that will make a place resonate in a poem. And those are the places that mean the most to us anyway, so why not explore them in poetry?
Greg Dennison
Yes! Good point.
Jeromeville from my blog is ostensibly a fictional place, but it’s really not… it is pretty much the city where I lived during that time period, but with all the names changed. People who live closer to the coast here tend to look down on everything inland, but the inland part of this state has a lot to love about it too.
Of course, there’s also a lot not to love about Jeromeville, and that is why I don’t move back. Part of my feelings about this place are also caught up in the time period and what was going on in my life, not only things related to the place itself, so there’s that too.
patientandkindlove
The people and the things that happened there definitely colour how you feel about a place. I lived in London when I was 19, and I still view it as this incredibly fun place, even though I would probably hate to live there now.
Greg Dennison
Exactly. I’ve thought about moving back at a few different points in my life, sometimes even applying for jobs there, but I always reach the conclusion that it isn’t a good idea to move back. Jeromeville is a great place for a student, a family, or a hippie; I’m no longer the first, I’m not yet the second, and I will never be the third.
But I realized a few years ago, that isn’t the whole story. The main reason I don’t move back to Jeromeville isn’t because I don’t agree with university town politics, nor is it that Jeromeville has become ridiculously expensive (which wasn’t part of my student-family-hippie assessment above). The real reason I don’t move back is because I don’t really want to live in Jeromeville again; I really want it to be 1998 again. And that just isn’t going to happen, move or no move…