by Uffington White Horse

When I first met TM, we indulged a joint pleasure by spending three or four days walking and camping on the high prehistoric Ridgeway from Oxfordshire to arrive at the wonderful megalithic site of Avebury, in the Wiltshire downs, for the summer solstice one June. The trip was not without drama, and back home a tragedy was unfolding; but that's a different story.

On the walk, I wrote a series of little prose poems, some of which appear in my book Bardo. Here's one:

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And Remember (near Uffington)

It was a hard ascent up to the chalklands into places that didn’t know water. Then stepping into a sky bigger than anything except mind, and how we live sometimes as if the sky were not big enough to swallow us whole, holy, but that day we parted the tranches of barley like waves in a field canted towards the horizon and knew that we could fly, upwards into the scudding blue intervals; and later though you were a foot away I could hear your heartbeat through the chalk and the day breathing the greengold barley and the silvermauve grasses and little downland flowers that knew something of blue and the skylark kiting its song, and below us the white horse dreaming in its long slow sleep as it has for millennia and the sky came down anyway – a moment when we might enter someone else’s life, and remember.

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© Roselle Angwin, 2008