Poetry Day - Nostalgia
Yesterday in the mail I received a belated birthday present from an old childhood friend: a book of poetry by Gillian Clarke, that she bought for me and had signed by the author at the Hay-on-Wye book festival in the UK. On Monday this week I also received a belated birthday present from another childhood friend (I'm still working out if it is a scarf or a headband, but it is pretty). These two friends are pictured below, on a youth group camp once upon a time. God blessed me greatly when he gave me these two friends in my youth. I don't know if we remain so similar now because we grew and matured and developed our interests and sensibilities together, or if we became such friends in our youth because the similarities, or at least their foundations, were already there. Either way, through all the years and places I have travelled, they still remain some of my closest kindred spirits.
Written inside my card from the girl on the left is a poem that's not by Gillian Clarke but by Ben Okri (from a book titled Wild), called Nostalgia. I love it already. Lately in Sydney the star jasmine has been flowering. I walk past several joyously pink-and-white blooming vines on my way to work, and when I am intercepted by it's delicate but effusive prefume I am momentarily in my childhood backyard in Tamworth, where our entire back fence was hidden in it. And I believe I feel the Sehnsucht. The poem is below.
Nostalgia
Like a ship in the sand
The days have moved slowly
But one never leaves land.
Dreams gather in black books:
Coiled spaces, mixed up parables,
Out of which looks
The soul as it reads time.
I travel the whole world
With an uncomplicated rhyme.
I feast in dreams and fast in life;
It seems that dreams transfigure strife.
So I send messages to my future
Within a murky paradigm.
Out at seas there are many rocks
I encounter before they are due;
Sleep resolves them in paradox.
Only in the present are things true.
Not even the future will last.
Nostalgia's a flower sent to the past.
Ben Okri