TRIP TO ELTHAM PALACE POEM 27

The tales we are told in childhood are in our lives forever - goblins, dragon and fairies beyond the mountain. Tricks by dwarves that are outwitted themselves are retold. Always an adventure whether befallen by mishap or intended as a personal quest, these stories contain morals, as well as fantasies. Our personal quest is not the same, but are similar, and it is from this that we dream and therefore live.

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“See yonder leafless tree against the sky, How they diffuse themselves into the air, And ever subdividing separate, Limbs into branches, branches into twigs, As if they loved the element, & hasted, To dissipate their being into it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pattern

We have our template of life,

And there is a pattern imprinted,

On your soul in the days lived,

You etch into this like a carving,

And like a book printed with a block,

We pass this onto our children.

This is our history my love,

Our legacy of love and protection,

How we view a position,

And how we render it appreciable to

Ourselves.

A basket is women from bended wood,

Soaked in a basin of water,

The willow bends to contorted form,

And is placed in pattern bound,

To carry objects for the ease of life.

So is our childhood pattern formed,

For we too bend and form ourselves

To the pleasure of our parentage,

With custom and nicety of our own.

We weave and we plan daily

As they grow,

Each decision made for us by the generation

Before,

Although they are not by the cradle,

They are by the fount,

And our legacy is secure in them.

“Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water, Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light, Blossoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter … Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night. Walking alone…was it splendour, or what, we were bound with? Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair? Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.” F. Scott Fitzgerald