My need for every second quickened.
|
We all have wealth shut within us,
|
Locked within us, trapped within us.
|
I have tried six years by six
|
To steer a painless course through life,
|
But I have suffered more for this
|
Than those who tightly close their eyes
|
To all out there - the pitch-black void
|
Where lurks the total of our past.”
|
I could not comprehend his drift,
|
He seemed to contradict himself -
|
But something in his traveller’s words
|
Made me see all there was -
|
Killer whales snatching seals
|
Off the sands of Patagonia;
|
Squibs bashed on the rocks
|
Of Mykanos and Kos;
|
Turtles netted and deshelled
|
On the Pondicherry coast;
|
These were the kind of scenes
|
I thought I’d hear unfold
|
As I listened to the tale
|
Of his first sojourn abroad.
|
“I first left these British Isles,
|
when I was seventeen, niave and innocent
|
our shores were all I knew;
|
our mountains were all that I had climbed;
|
Our people white-skinned and Lalloned
|
was the world of a boy taught to know
|
that out there lay an empire once so vaste
|
that one third the globe was British.
|
Those days were gone, and none knew
|
where Britain stood in the minds
|
of Sikhs or Kenyans or any nation freed
|
at last from colonial rule.
|
The memory of the Third Reich years
|
was still imprinted on a new built Europe
|
twenty six years after Berlin fell
|
and the Allies split - East and West.
|
I began to journey south -
|
Through England I travelled by thumb
|
to leave Dover on the midnight tide
|
like Harry Four on his way to Agincourt.
|
I first set foot on foreign soil
|
four o’clock one morning late July.
|
I slept with young folk like myself
|
beneath an up-turned boat on the shingle.
|
Daylight came too soon from behind the town
|
beyond which lay continental Europe
|
stretching eastwards to the Orient.
|
In that Belgian channel port, I knew
|
nothing of the world beyond.
|
