As dark falls earlier each evening, and the first frosts point to the depths of winter, I’m reminded of a visit I paid to a museum exhibition about prehistory. I read a poem there that’s been circling around me ever since. It’s called Routes:
Time has frozen this midwinter night.
Outside, the pavement coated with a transparent skin.Inside, I retreat into down, sensing the vibration
Of polar sheets creeping south, burying usA thousand feet under blue ice, diverting the river
Out of the Vale of St Albans into the London Basin.Welcome home. Welcome first citizen, chasing
Reindeer over the hip joint with France,Tropical and glacial cycles, waves of migrators –
Your long trek north, from below the Sahara,Circling a camp fire by the Thames,
The hair of wolves over tight backs; dread-Locked beards, un-polished eyes, your slow,
Heavy mouths chewing fresh rhinoceros, roasted,No spices; unaware that you are dislocating
From France as you eat, that the Channel is rising,That my heated body floats above a London of birch
And pine forest, of open grassland where gangsOf straight-tusked elephants gather in Trafalgar
Square, hippopotami wallow in the brown marshesOf Pall Mall and from Marble Arch I gaze longingly
On sheets of marigold, meadowsweet, mint.
Bernardine Evaristo
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Tess!
That picture and poem are marvelous to read, to contemplate, and to imagine how it was before so many, many things, events, and people made it what it is today; to envision those early people unable to get back to the now-France because water had come to first block the way; to wonder how they managed to endure the winter that year and the years to come…
I look forward to this site’s development and to following the links you’ve provided.
Thanks!!!!!! Barbara
Wonderful images in that poem! I never imagined Brits eating rhinoceros or hippos wallowing in the Thames. Off to a wonderful start, tess.
(barefoot) Barbara
Thank you very much to both Barbaras!
Wonderful, another blog to follow! I love the poem…it’s so evocative.
Thanks
Miriam
I love the title of your new blog, it does indeed sounds like something that would spring up intuitively and sound lacking in the explanation of its beauty. And this poem is positively luscious. I could roll around in that very last line for a long while.
Miriam, thanks for your comment, I rather thought you’d enjoy the poem. It brings home to me just how new everything in London is when we think it’s actually old.
Christine, thanks to you also. The lines I liked the best were around the ‘welcome home first citizen, chasing reindeer over the hip joint with France’.
congratulations on the new blog, tess. i know it has been stirring around in your ‘things i think i’d like to do’ pile for awhile
. i would love to know the process you used for the photo…as i myself tiptoe into using photoshop elements.
Hi again – I forgot to ask if the picture and poem together are your creation, Tess. You do that sort of words and pictures so wonderfully, so I wondered and guessed you created this, too. It’s wonderful and the words so perfectly fit the timeless picture.
I love that you love the mysteries!
I can be Barbara Anne, if that makes it easier!
Lucy: thank you for the congrats, we’ll see how it works out. On the photo, I can’t remember exactly, but I think what I did was: 1) grab the basic photo (which is a stock photo I downloaded from somewhere), 2) reduce the colour saturation so it was less bright (enhance menu/adjust colour), 3) use a small amount of diffuse glow on the filter gallery, 4) add another filter gallery effect – it may have been palette knife, 5) create a new adjustment layer (right hand side at bottom of screen in normal layout) using the photo filter on violet, 6) add an additional plain layer and type the text into it, 7) merge all the layers (layer menu) and finally
used one of the cookie cutter crop shapes for the jagged edge. Hmmm, it’s more complicated to describe than to do!
Barbara: no I can’t claim authorship of the poem sadly, it was something I saw there. I didn’t copy it down at the time so I contacted the museum curator and he kindly sent it to me.