Somewhere Else Writers (SEW) March 22

This month’s poem ‘It was as if’ by Frank McMahon was written several months into the first lockdown during the wonderful Spring weather.

Frank said: ‘Images and memories of hill forts, (some in the Cotswolds) came to mind and informed the first few stanzas, alongside the growing feeling of uncertainty when encountering people we did not know.

‘The absence of ‘plane and traffic noise took me back to childhood and the sense of an uncluttered natural world, enhanced now by greater knowledge of its complexity and amplified by people discovering it and its benefits for the first time.

‘In a way, the poem was a consoling counterpoint to the fear and hardships being experienced by many at that time.’

The poem featured in the anthology, Can you hear the People sing? published by Palewell Press. Palewell is also the publisher behind Frank’s first volume of poems, At the Storm’s Edge. They will be publishing his second volume, A Different Land, in June.

To read It was as if go to Cirenscene.com.

For more work by local writers go to somewhere-else-writers.org

It was as if

By Frank McMahon

we fled to the forest and the hills,
dug ditches, erected palisades, set
sentries at intervals around. And waited.

Messengers came with news of deaths
and from the temple, orders,
prognostications, warnings

about infiltration. Strangers we sent away.
We waited, looking sideways at each other,
fed ourselves as best we could.

Then we saw, as if we had new sight,
that dew was making brush strokes revealing
what we had overlooked: white blossom

of hornbeam and chestnut, the sky wiped
clear of mote and cloud. The land
filled with birdsong, larks and mewing kites.

For some this was world was new,
gilding their watchful stares with smiles
and startled revelation.  

For us it was an older world returned,
the backdrop to our childhood’s careless
pass through. Now we walked more

slowly, attending and exploring,
the air tense with fret and wonder,
almost a time of innocence returned.

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