Conscious that there is a small window of light before the dusk falls I hop over the barrier into the Glen. There is a new gate, grey as shiny steel and crowned with trident spikes, who owns this gate but the council, opening up another pedestrian entry point to the Glen for them, its lock telling us so… I read this as a good sign, that sometime the machines they ride will be left behind and the humans will come on foot with flesh hands and legs to carry them, I guess the first they will do is paint the gate to integrate and smooth the transition – a rite of passage is required. As I walk on down I’m drawn back up to the place of the fish, but the verge mowings already tell me she is no longer there with her roe, and I’m spared the disappointment as I am pulled back further and see, for the first time, a ribbon of tarmac woven the other way across the path, is this an infilling of an older route…? One that would lead into the place I live before it was my home. Its edges bearded with grass as if to say there is another meadow squashed beneath, an underland. I look for co-ordinates and find a perfect tree, an oak with a bend, and an intermingling of leaves with another, a twin oak making the portal through which I see the dark triangles of the evergreens on the other side. This is the ground where I once found in a shallow dug out by a dog the body of a fledgling blackbird, and I feel I stand on a hill of small sacrifices. Walking on down I find the ragwort buachaláin unearthed and presented to the bench cementing my mood for the walk, the final encore. And as I pass onto the pitch I see that one of the limes is wearing a twisted bangle on its thin branch improvised from a massive human ear hoop.
I am heading toward the three stemmed birch and a catch up on The Millar mushroom (possibly, and if so, aptly) I found last week. My spore print yielded white, and only nearly pink, spores if you squeezed the imagination. The light is beginning to dwindle as I step onto the path where the council machines come from, I see from a distance it is not as it was, last week mistaken for a plastic bag, but there are younger ones, not so wavy, their smaller parasols splitting already as they emerge form the undergrowth. Each holding fallen sycamore helicopters, one copter has a tri-paddle form, puncturing the creamy surface with its stalk, I lift it from its piercing and place it gently down, looking up I see the white lightening of the twisting beech in the darkening lane, making co-ordinates. Looking back for the big old Millar I see she has spread her wings and her brown flesh forms fecund valleys for insect life, walking too in the Glen in the October dusk
Here is a beautiful poem I found today by Sam Garvan:
I love this poem because it summons so much of living in a moment that is made still <3
Thanks, so glad you like the poem! Sam