Winging It
[Following on from serendipitous moments relating to geese...]
The other thing about geese is their migrating, probably leading to being associated with Travels to Legendary Place. They go back and fore… and so will we as that’s the talent of the wild geese we’re going to embody. We can do this with consummate ease and not feel the slightest bit giddy.
In time we are flying back to September 2013. I’m with my relatively new fiancé in Bromyard, Herefordshire, proper introduction to follow once we land. Our destination is a Legendary Place: The Eco-Etho Research Education Centre at La Combe, La Drome, France. There we will have a bovine adventure.
But we need to go even further back to understand these beautiful wildfowl and land at the legendary place where I ‘became’ a wild goose and found the literary magic of poetry. It's the school on Hayling Island where I’d been bullied. And the geese didn’t appear in an English lesson – ‘though by all rights they should have – but as I was meant to be doing fractions.
With the sun rather than the moon on their wings, half a dozen dazzling white geese were feeding on marshland outside the window of our temporary classroom. It was a ‘terrapin hut’ (why are they called that?) – a large shed raised up as if on stilts. And you can still find them, since they have a habit of outliving their temporary classification.
Finding fractions utterly incomprehensible, and gazing out of the window just as the geese took off I became the invisible seventh goose. Aged eleven but the image is as clear as the geese who fly over The House of Beauty most mornings.
I had no quill pen, but the pencil scratched out:
THE GEESE
A flock of snow-white geese
Flying
A white curtain of feathers
Dazzling beauty
Circling round
Somehow not real at all.
One minute they’re here
Now they’re gone
They seem to bring peace, harmony
And joy.
Silken images floating gracefully
Into the sun.
The fact I was allowed to finish the poem was down to my teacher Miss Worsfold’s prescience, aided no doubt by English being her specialism. And perhaps, too, by her accurately judging my mathematical talents to be zero…
Now, at last, we are ready for take off.
Are you ready to honk avec un accent français? Drop the ‘H’ and you’ll be fine...
I have better Blackbird and Horse than French. Fortunately, my Fiancé was almost bi-lingual. And it was thanks to him that I got to perform with a cow, meet a formidable animal whisperer and have my first international appearance as a poet…
Let’s wing it over the Channel [next post].
#geese #languages #poetical