We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage / And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, / We Poets of the proud old lineage / Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why ... (James Elroy Flecker)

27.9.18

Behind the Wall


Behind the Wall

What is the story you have never told? That is the one which will free you to tell all the rest. 

So the advice goes. I think it’s true. 

I know which story I have never told. 

And certainly it’s true that I never can seem to get on with telling the rest. (I make abortive beginnings at times, but they fizzle out.)

I don’t even have to make that story public once it is written, I tell myself. I just have to write it. Just for me, to free me.

I am 78. In less than two months I’ll be 79. Surely I can do it by now? After all, it was 36 years ago! (36 years ago … and yesterday.)

I imagine myself starting to write. The first sentences form in my mind.  They are graceful and easy.

But then the wall rises in front of me again. It is high and wide and very thick. It is made of bluestone blocks. It is topped by rolling scrolls of barbed wire, razor sharp.  

It does not exist physically any more. The whole place was torn down years ago, to make way for a new suburb. (I wonder how people live there, sleep there. Surely they are troubled by ghosts?  Surely they must be possessed by rage and tears, violence and dread, the deepest despair.)

The wall has gone. It is all past history. But still in my mind it rises up. Tell my story? Your story? Our story? It is enough that we lived it. It’s no-one else’s business. 

Except that we wrote it in poems, and sometimes I still do … obliquely. We wrote it in letters too, but they were all burned a long time ago.

I never watch shows set in prison, no matter how good they are said to be. They might be too real. Or not real enough. Either way, I don’t need to look.

Your face is before me, forever young. You were not yet 25 when you said goodbye – to me and everyone.

You smile at me. Your eyes are clear, and very blue. Yes of course I cry … still … again … a little bit. 

I know what we said and wrote to each other. I remember it all. 



In response to Poets United's Midweek Motif ~ The Wall


9 comments:

  1. "It is made of bluestone blocks."....I can feel a bruise in my heart reading this. Glad the wall is no more. Oh, so sad.

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  2. That was a difficult and moving read, Rosemary.

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  3. Some walls never seem to tumble. The wall of betrayal is one of them.

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  4. I wish I had written this. Such is trauma!
    "But then the wall rises in front of me again. It is high and wide and very thick. It is made of bluestone blocks. It is topped by rolling scrolls of barbed wire, razor sharp."

    From my own experience, this is the kind of wall that truly is never gone, but writings like this poem reduce the height/scope/amount of time it paralyzes.

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  5. Oh, this wall that doesn't exist any more in its physicality is still so overpowering in how it rises up. And we try to tell this untold story, at least parts of it, in the guide of allusions and metaphors in our poems.

    The hurt and the heart both are powerful in your words.

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  6. Walls that no longer exist physically, are concrete in the mind. Powerful poem, Rosemary.

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  7. I have walls that rise up when i try to tell certain parts of my story, too, Rosemary, so i resonate with your poem so much. I can see that clear-eyed lad, and wonder at the backstory, which must be very sad, as there is a prison in it.

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  8. I think that even after we tell the story we've never told before, more untold tales are born... So the circle never ends. There will always be more.

    Love how the piece ends...

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  9. Walls do make for sadness. I am touched by each poem I read, and sure enough it is the "wall." I hope you will be able to write your story, our story one day. I will wait for you.

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