His First Walk For Too Long

The light found its way through the branches.

It caught him like a searchlight.

It asked him these questions:

Why is this not enough?

Why must there be more?

Look at that lead-grey beech, just standing there -

Tall and strong without desire or need.

Look at that mottled birch -

Smaller and gentler in its own silvery way.

And the wild weeds colonising the ground.

And the birds calling other birds:

Passing on genetic messages of warning and ritual.

But this time all is alien:

Alien to one now familiar

With the ego’s ravenous thirst.

He's no longer at home in this wood.

And only a year since he’d visit each day.

Not then an alien amid its strange ways and complex systems.

Once upon a time on a moor or in a wood, by a river or up a hill,

Each and everything would leave a fingerprint upon his brain.

He knew all the ways. All the peculiarities.

The thisness of all things.

The manner in which things dealt with seasons’ change

And with man’s sculpting hands.

Now all these things were as fleshless

As the photos that litter homes

With their untruths and sentiment.

He wanted the other worlds, the other days, back.

Bring the moors back!

Bring my little mountains back!

To be in your grasp again.

For him to be in their grasp.

Not to be at a secure distance.

To be within the smell, sight, touch...

The hearing of it all.