Bakewell wet photo by Paul Brookes
Haibun for peace
I have never camped, never encountered wilderness, never had friends who would have wanted to find it. Never felt the urge, or dared, to get so far from other people, but only for a while. How could I face the return? Like ringing the crabby old one’s doorbell and running away.
Where walking into a passage grave feels like going home, back to the womb of human civilisation, a reverent, silent experience, walking into a wild place is an intrusion. Eyes watch. Ears listen. Nothing shows itself, not while we are there. Not until we go away.
People say, but surely you’d love to visit the Serengeti, the Amazon, the endless lakes of Finland, to stand on the roof of the world, look up from the bottom of the ocean? The answer is, no, I wouldn’t. I would rather time flowed over and around them without the clatter of human feet, the chatter of human tongues.
Isn’t it enough to know the wild is there without jetting in to an airport, driving along roads cut through virgin forest, staying in purpose-built hotels, fouling the peace? Just to take a few photos, touch a tree or two?
Spring flowers
uncurl from winter dreaming
sleeping beauties.
Jane Dougherty
Bios and Links
Jane Dougherty
lives and works in southwest France. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems and stories have been published in magazines and journals including Ogham Stone, the Ekphrastic Review, Black Bough Poetry, ink sweat and tears, Gleam, Nightingale & Sparrow, Green Ink and Brilliant Flash Fiction. She blogs at https://janedougherty.wordpress.com/ Her poetry chapbooks, thicker than water and birds and other feathers were published in October and November 2020.