“Once we were fresh in our skin, bones,
With all the time in the world
To become. ”
-Kathryn Dawson –
I love to write. I keep bits of paper in the most unlikely of places so that if I get there and need to put something down to remember it – I can. When I was around fifteen I had my first poem published in an Anthology. It wasn’t anything hugely fantastic but to me it was like finding the moon and the stars all at once within reach. I kept writing, I wrote poetry, lyrics, prose…if it could be written, I wrote it. If it had never been written before, I wrote it even harder. The achievement was a drive and I kept going with my ambitions to be published again. I have five books sat proudly on my bookshelf now each with a poem of mine included.
The point is that if there’s an occasion, I will write for it. As I was browsing the shots I took today I was struck with the memory of verse that I had written some time ago. For many years and even now I can write about any topic and any subject and I can feel the emotions that you would expect to feel if it was happening to you. There has to be a passion behind the topic, an understanding in my own mind of what it’s like to be there.
So the pictures today took me back to that poem and to the fact that for so long, I’ve not written anything. I have a notebook full of ideas, I have scraps of paper in a plastic sleeve that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else except for me – but I’ve not written properly.
Today I went into the garden to get my photos since the Crocus’s were in full bloom and just begging to be snapped. I was saddened to see that most of them had been crushed. We had people in yesterday to prune a tree and the Crocus’s had chosen the unfortunate place of growing right at the base of it. Needless to say they are still in full bloom and very much vibrant albeit quite lopsided and broken. I suppose in a sense that’s why I was reminded of the poem I had written – Once we had all the time to become.
I’m going to share the poem now, here. I don’t expect it to be understood or even read smoothly. I read back now and sometimes think what planet was I on?! However because this is my 365 day challenge and because I want to write again I am starting with a reminder of what I used to compose.
Once we were fresh in our skin, bones,
With all the time in the world –
To become.
Once dust, once flesh, once clouds,
Scaling the crest of a hill,
Unaccountable.
Once we were breaths of air, clean,
stroking the thorn of a rose –
We’d laugh.
Once we were miles in a wheel,
Uncompleted, a journey less –
Apart, alone.
Once we were fresh in our skin. Bones.
With all the time in the world.
To Become.
Kathryn Dawson Photography 