No Walk in the Park

 

There is, for me, no landscape without memory.

 

Landscape renders the unreal real,

a soul in death,

intuition curled up in cool caverns,

amorphous in pebble, stone, rock,

tossed in river, stream, rapid, locked

in ice above, below, flounces in flows

of meltwater lapping ocean shores,

earth’s spheres north, south, east, west,

preserve hidden depths.

 

Landscape without memory is a future

of weather-worn days roaming pre-destined

routes ancient to modern, tossing skyward

people, places.

 

My childhood landscape was an illusion,

a non-place over which I had no right to roam.

My home, a concrete bunker with lace curtains

to hide the hurt within.

 

I ran stone pavements in my Cinderella shoes,

stubbed my toe, scraped my cheek on gravelled

ground barring my way to grassy footpaths out of danger.

 

No walk in the park my childhood landscape

until I climbed the distant dream seen

through the broken pane of my bedroom window

feet on fire.

 

No walk in the park my childhood landscape

until the flood-waters came and washed me

out of my garden of fear where Alice-like

I fell through a ravine holding on to my history.

 

And so, like Persephone, I was rescued, reshaped:

I lay in a meadow dressed in clothes of freedom flowers:

Miss Willmott’s Ghost, Lavender Vera and Lady’s Mantle.

 

In time I knew how to learn that memory is landscape.

 

Landscape is memory.

Jean Rees Lyons