Travel can move you. It gives you time and space if you travel “well”. And by that I mean slowly, taking time, taking in space, people, places, culture.
For me, if done well, it is a time of contemplation, away from the day to day pressures, the lists, the obligations. It’s a time to think, to write, to be happy, to grieve. To feel whatever moves one at any given moment without feeling judged or observed.
So, sometimes, occasionally, I wrote my thoughts down in my version of poetry. I have no idea if it’s good, bad or indifferent or even if it’s really poetry but it doesn’t matter because it serves as a form of expression that works for me.
Below are records of moments on my travels in Europe in 2016…about how life or the moment appeared during those minutes or hours. Or you can link HERE to a complete (but currently limited) anthology of my scribblings over several years
POEMS FROM TRAVELS IN EUROPE 2016
The Steel Line
I travel the steel line
Rhythm beneath like time lost
The wastelands of the mind
Littered with lost hope of youth
The steel whispers to me
Of all the melancholy days
Of the great dying to come
The bitter taste of hate
Survival a matter of mere fate
Abandoned
Like the detritus of the soul
Abandoned, weeping
In grey Croatian mountains
Empty windows, lost hopes
Building shells slip past
Looking down
From a distant hill, turtles swim
Landing on the bleeding beach
Life still beats its wounded heart
These greats beasts of hope|
Older than the damaged soul
Harbingers of future worlds
On a journey from fear to hope
The battered cross is bent and rusty
But the turtles pay no heed
Their vision of a former world
Devoid of doom and strife and fire
When holy dragons bestrode the sky
And the striped tiger still rode the hills
Dreams
Hopes and dreams
The fading picture
A single drop of hope
Your words pierce my soul
Your hands pierce my skin
Oceans
When the great fish no longer swim
The steely oceans now empty
The Forests dead, dying grey
Speak of life long ago gone
Unbroken Heart
I tear my heart from its flimsy perch
I offer it to you to break asunder
A heart unbroken
Is like a life un-lived
A futile purity
A spirit that has known no night
Like a blue sky
That never saw the gold of cloud
Hidden
Every second soul carries its secret
Hidden behind the mask
The smile hides the grimace
Lips forming fine
As the soul’s jagged edges rips;
We walk among the half-living
Death Comes
I think of you gone
And her
Her bed empty and cold
I see her face in the window
And you
The missing smile
I think of me
I see the turtles below
And I fly
Sun
Blue blue, blue water
Beneath the yellow sun
Fingers of heat sear in
My skin takes it deep
Earth beneath burns me
Body opens and breathes
Berlin
A continent’s history
Written on your streets
On your buildings
Like scars across the wrists
The knives of dictators
The swords of emperors
Your arteries of concrete
Your rivers of blood
Now bandaged
With a flag of blue and gold
Staunched with an idea
An idea of shared humanity
And washed by a million refugees
Politicians
The putrified remains of your ambition..
Run blood red upon our soils
Your grasping hands reach for power
Tearing the living fibres from our being
Your giant ambition written in the camps
Where the persecuted lie dying, abandoned
Hands bloodied from grasping your barbed wire
Blood on your arrogant, egoed heads
From where the stink of your lies erupts
Your storied ambition written in a million Arab dead
Your cursed soul will be spat upon by history
A Pine Wind
Beneath the casuarina’s whispered breath
Where the wind speaks of aeons past
On the ancient rocks toppling edge
Above the flooded river plains
Ten thousand cicadas calling out
Cascading their flowing sounds of life
And each random flower is a world itself
Here where distance silences a city’s chatter
Every trouble is small besides the whisper breeze
This is Part 7 of the blog series “97 Days Adrift in Europe”. Links to other episodes and related content can be found below:
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