Welcome to October’s Poem of the Month. I recalled reading this poem a while back, but with my pending departure in the morning for a vacation to Portugal and Italy, I thought it an appropriate choice for this month’s poem of the month. It resonated with me because it looks at travel as a restorative exercise, not just as a list of monuments to see, or museums to visit, or restaurants to try. For me, it captures the spirit of what travel is really all about – walking into a place, altogether different, where you can find yourself “right back at a beginning…”
Warmest wishes – back in two weeks…
Joseph Stroud
(1943 – )
Directions
by Joseph Stroud
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world
Take a plane to London.
From King’s Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of Nidd,
a narrow road with hight stone walls on each side,
and soon you’ll be on the moors. There’s a pub,
The Drovers, where it’s warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculiar.
For a moment everything will be all right. You’re back
at a beginning. Soon you’ll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.
You’ll walk for hours. You’ll walk the freshness
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.
