From Birnam Wood to Dunsinane

Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane
I cannot taint with fear.

I finished The Girl in a Swing and feel slightly empty. When I picked it up to re-read last week, I had no recollection of that happening the first time I read it, but now I seem to remember a period of deep melancholia simply because the book had ended and I didn't want it to. The story is dark and frightening ( I could not read it in bed) and yet you feel uplifted for having known the characters. I need to write a note to myself about how it made me feel so that I will not forget next time I pick it up (in about 2021). The book has a masterly weaving of the Agamemnon with a modern tale. So much of the story goes untold and it is better for that. As far as I can recall, there are no descriptions of the appearance of even the main characters; you are left to make up your own image. In your head, they become your own ideals. Read it and you will want to be there. The beauty of the intetnet is that as you read you can look up locations and in this book, they are all real (as they are in most of Richard Adams' books). See the Coombe Gibbet, The Blowing Stone, the Uffington White Horse where Karin wishes for something to make their fortune and has the wish answered in the form of The Girl in the Swing. I understand that in real life, the Enigma of the Girl in a Swing factory has been unravelled which makes a nice postscript to the book. Right! Now to try and find Watership Down (read the customer reviews). I do seem to recall the same sense of disappointment that the book had finished as I did with The Girl in a Swing.

I am feeling confused at my lack of memory of the first reading of The Girl in a Swing. I seem to remember that all the German Romantic Poetry (There seems to be a logic in putting 'Romantic' after 'German' - The other way round would mean something different) was what first made me write my own (awful) poems. My favourite poem from he book is one by Heine which starts 'Wenn ich in dein Augen Seh..' (When I look into your eyes). I can't find it on the web other than for the first line and I can't remember it well enough to write it down without spelling mistakes. I had forgotten the poem, 'The Dwarf' (Or the Gnome).
but it made me sad this time. From all ths falls every poem have ever written and therefore I am grateful for that, (even for the bad ones). I was looking through the notebook I bought in Bali in which to write poems, and found one I had forgotten or overlooked because I though it was bad and it was strange. It was narrated by one the girls in a Trance Dance and seemed to question why she never remembered what happened in the Dance. Of course I have forgotten to bring it with me today so you will have to wait. Maybe I will look at again and see that it is really bad. Anyway, here is the first part of the long poem which I posted the other day and then took down because I didn't like the ending. And now to post and publish.

Un-titled November 2002

I returned to a most special place in memory,
by accidental and un-thought out design,
to walk the blasted, empty tracks
with the minds of all the academic early men
who burned their vision into my mind
from the depths of artifice and ingenuity.
There are people at a distance,
known faces, without names but loved
and happy in this interval of real-life.
I could not speak to them for fear of knowing
them and forcing dredging of our common memory
for things we think the other likes or wants.
The day darkens, dampens and encloses me,
wraps me like some tiny animal
the children found beside the road and loved
and thought that they could mend with love.
My mother at the door, corrected them
and wrung the necks of those poor creatures,
sending many children green and crying
away into the night that suddenly was darker,
colder than before, with less love than they thought.
But I was raised above this fate and was loved,
unspoken but with definity if not divinity.
The tracks are gloomy, dripping, and colour
all the stream with grey complexity, shadows
of the mazes summer makes to shelter animals.
But here, they open up and only ghosts find cover.
The track walks on ahead and opens into fields,
un-sown pastures growing earth and nothing more.
If no Crow spoke in that furrowed, hallowed ground,
I would not know it, for it begged a raucous caw,
synesthesia of earth and bird-cry,
linked by twenty years of poetry from school to here.
I stop at this edge, imagining myself a target
of the raptors, high and black and mighty,
ready to fall to earth and tear and pinion
any idiotic creature mad enough to run through here.