Waking in the morning
to the tumbling of a stream
outside my shining window
and the dreams I had recede
like strangers, met on the road.
I think of stories of hitchers
buckling their seatbelts, pale in the night
picked up perhaps at a crossroads
perhaps at a cemetery gate
who talk of nothing much, but when
the driver pulls up at the place
that they have named as their home
and turns – they are gone – and too late
you know the unknown
has touched you, there on the way
travelling through dark to the dawn.
I’ve posted this new poem as yesterday was National Poetry Day. It was inspired by urban myths of phantom hitchhikers, which have always fascinated me. Wikipedia has a very comprehensive entry on the phenomenon – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_hitchhiker.
A couple of things caught my attention here. First was the inevitable dissolving of dreams by the time I’ve made my first steps out of bed. It’s confusing to me that something often so profound in sleep evaporates so quickly. I’m interested in this.
Lastly and a bit weak is that I was listening to a street child from Ethiopia talking on the World Service. He slept in a cemetery for a couple of years when he first moved to Addis Ababa. This invoked a strong memory of a street kid cursing me with some Voodoo because I didn’t give out money while in a Taxi journey. Not because I’m miserly but because giving out cash is instant pandemonium in Ethiopia. But the use off sharp breath bursts for the curse spooked me a bit. I wont bore you with what I’ve learned about this kind of thing since then.
Also worried the last podcast may well have shredded my audio recommendations credibility. I promise no more TM from now on ;>)