The last day of the summer season of writing outside. The sky comes down to meet the land, and finds me cold and tired. Trying to write with sleep-deprived fingers shaking. A scrawl I can scarcely read when called upon. I'm sure I didn't write "drifting cheddar bread" but that's what it looks like.
…to feel the space? Ah yes: Drifting ahead and behind…
Allowing myself to move into my own space. Finding my own bubble outside of the conversation and inside the sunken path.
It has rained and the blades of grass hold jewels that seem like tears and have me softly wiping them away. But I cannot console the whole runnel, no matter how sad it finds this sudden end of a summer.
We walk slowly and talk not about what we've been through, rather about the gifts the missing year may have brought, if we're brave enough to inquire into what happened to us: not just locked down and lost jobs or furlough or sickness and death, but fear and fortitude, anger and release. I am timid about voicing my experience which, after an early melt-down, was mostly relaxation, and joy, and finding my way back to myself and to new friends who would not be in my life but for the strangeness of the year.
If I am to stand in my truth, I have to speak this. I am now different and happily so, and so for its impact on me personally, I would not have not had the experience that was 2020.
We can lament the places we didn't go and the things we didn't do – and now may never see or do – but what about the places we did go, exploring our backyards and the further reaches of our own internal worlds? What about the things we did, that otherwise we would not have done? The conversations. The learning to use technology, we'd rather not go near. The coming-back-togetherness of generations that have been living increasingly separated lives. The local, oh so very local, walks we did again and again and felt like vagabonds and outlaws just for taking a walk in the woods, or a river stroll. Those were among the gifts.
The books we revisited. I can't be the only one who decided to go back to the already-owned books, when the libraries closed, and stayed with them afterwards.
I went back to Pern – the third planet in the Rukbat system, where there are fire-breathing dragons and men who ride them – and discovered what I hadn't realised before: that the colours and sizes of Anne McCaffrey's dragons parallel our dragon- and damsel-flies. And that made me smile, because I spent the first lockdown hunting demoiselles and ducking beneath the mighty bronzes.
These are some of my stray thoughts on a blustery day on the marsh. A rain-swept summer day of high tide and passing squalls and blown-in pink-footed geese.
I walk above the marsh and that nor' westerly wind blows yet more fragments of my past life away, birds singing to haunt them on their journey. The sea is hiding behind the berm, crashing, shouting for attention. Two lonely walkers trudge the shingle, westwards. Together, but somehow not. Their stance from this distance suggests a conversation along the lines of whose idea was it anyway?
Been there. Done that.
It didn't stop me coming back.
We gather outside a hide, and share our individual capturing of a five-minute moment. Take ten people, put them inside a moment, and see what they find. It can be astonishing. Some take a detail, sometake the expanse, others drift from that moment to others past or future or make-believe. And yet, the moment, the common inspiration holds. There is a thread that becomes evident as we share those momentary harvests from the marsh and offer them back to the wind.
We laugh at the very fact we are doing this. Standing in the rain, proclaiming. It is so archaic, and absurd, and wonderful.
And we drift onwards – outwards – towards that sea we can hear screaming to be seen.
Onto the shingle. "Which way shall we go?" someone asks. Whichever way the others are not is the consensus. But it's an idle question, the only way is over the banking and down to the water. And the water jumps ecstatically to greet us. A chaos of ice water leaping and laughing and polishing pebbles and doing its exuberant best to remind us that the very land beneath our feet is not safe – not stable – not ours.
We talk about the roar of the waves, but it isn't the water that roars as it crashes on the shore. What we hear is the protest of the churned land being pulled on the back-draught. We hear the refusal of land to be reclaimed, sand and stones trying to cling to solid ground, and being ground down instead. We hear the eternal battle between water and earth.
Or is it a dance? Is what we hear the passionate exchange of life and love between land and liquid?
There's a flag-buoy out beyond the surf, grey enough to be a fin. And closer in, we spot a bobbing head. Seal.
If land-loving folk ascribe good luck to the path-crossing of a black cat, I'm sure the seaward-looking ones ascribe similar omens to a seal. Like cats, they are creatures of their element, and care not for our whims and fancies. This one swims along the shore, playing in and under the surf. Or just maybe, she has risen to hear poetic souls, who must be part-cat, part-seal, part-earth, part-water.
Maybe she has risen to hear the words we are casting to the beach and the wind and the waves.
We gather into a circle, to read round. A read-around. It feels like something that could become a ritual. A trusting. A sharing. An opening of a few minutes of our mind-wandering. This is new this season.
Rituals are simple things. The only rule for this one is: trust your voice, read what you have written for it does have value.
We read.
Lists. Poems. Observations. Thoughts. Scraps and scavengings. This, we say, is what the sea and the sky and the stones and the other 'here things' have shown me today. This day. This one wet windy August day, at Cley.
Then, wind blown, we disperse for a last few minutes of reflection, to consider what we have found over six separate days, a six-week summer season of coming together and writing.
As this draws to a close, I idly wonder what the collective noun for poets might be.
I know that the erudite and the soul-less have come up with entire lists of witty ideas. I also know they are wrong. As I come away from the shore to shelter behind the banked shingle, I look upon my friends. I don't know any of these people well, but call them friends. Not all consider themselves poets, but they wouldn't be here if they didn't have poetic souls.
And I know in that moment that poets are like geese. They have a different collective noun depending upon whether they are on the ground or in flight.
On the ground, I believe that the collective noun for poets is: a scattering…
See: here we are. In the lee of the shingle bank, all writing, not one looking at another except in passing. We are scattered, into our own worlds, our own words, our own relationship with this place and this day and this weather, which has decided to wild us in parting, but gently so, wind hustling the rain, exhilarating us, wanting us to come again. A scattering of poets. Close enough to feel the presence of our kin, but strewn, a hand-broadcast of seeds, growing. A scattering.
But only on the ground.
In flight, I believe that the collective noun for poets is: a gather-in.
See: here we are in flight. We are reading, declaiming, whispering, shouting against the wind like some Celtic druid in these lands, or a Persian Sufi pausing in the whirl, or the Yoruba telling their tradition, the Koori singing of the Dream Time. A poet in flight sings of their homeland. And of their journey in it and/or beyond it. A poet in flight gathers in.
So we gather in another circle. Gathering back together, but pulling in more than our unique selves. There is a crude stone circle in the lee of the coastal defence. No megaliths, only double-fist-sized beach rocks, set in a round. We each stand by one. We form a wall-free, roofless temple to honour our words – or an open store-house for this season's harvest.
Be clear: this is not a gathering, it is specifically a gather-in. To "gather in" is both a bringing in and a meeting inside of. Here we stand, buffeted, bringing in what we have found over six weeks of immersion in Cley. We gather. We gather inside our words and memories and the ways in which we're changed and not. We gather in our emotion. We gather in this place. Always we gather in –in both the sense of gathering within it and the sense of gathering it into ourselves, into our group, into the shared experience of standing and shouting our words to the wind and the marsh…and letting them be carried away. Away on the wind, away in the memory of each other, away onto the page or not.
Over six weeks, we have written. And whether we call them so or not, we have written poems. In describing what we saw, what we felt, what the weather did, what people said, the memories jolted, the hopes set free, the pain we felt, for this very precise place and the wider world, the tiny details, the great panorama: in doing all of that we caught the magic of a moment. A very personal moment for each of us. This is reality. This is poetry.
And I am learning that all you need in order to be a poet, is to look upon what is and see it.
