Poems and Paths: THE SHADOW PEOPLE

Saturday, 1 December 2012

THE SHADOW PEOPLE

The Shadow People

By shadow hedge along the lane

Where shadow trees stand stark and plain,

Two shadow figures, shaped like pegs

Glide on fantastic shadow legs,

Their shadow bodies moving round

Like shadow stains across the ground.

And on his shadow head, see that

One shadow wears a shadow hat,

That makes the low sun’s piercing rays

Cast deeper shadows on his face

Where, beneath the shadow brim,

There’s just the shadow of a grin.

2 comments:

Unknown said...: Gosh I am so enjoying this new blog of yours Pete. Great poems and beautiful photos...a little treat ever time I look at it..; 1 December 2012 at 13:04
Pete Thompson said...: Thabks, Liz. Just started with the photography - hopefully getting a better camera for Christmas.; 2 December 2012 at 01:12

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About Poems and Paths

‘Poems and Paths’ is a record of my own impressions and perceptions, mostly from walking in the wolds and vales of the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Walking and writing have always strolled along together hand-in-hand, exploring, at one and the same time, the pathways on the ground and the pathways in the mind. It’s an intimate inter-relationship that can rejoice in broad, sunny vistas or creep in trepidation through the shadowlands where one might expect any map to warn: ‘Here Be Dragons’.

Paths are so much more than just connections that join together places. They also connect us directly to the landscape, to the past and the future, to those who have walked there before us and who will follow us and, most importantly, they connect us to our own imaginations and all the thoughts, emotions and half-remembered associations that lie not far below the surface of our consciousness.

The works of all the well- and lesser-known walker/writers bear testimony to this: George Borrow, Richard Jefferies, William Wordsworth, John Clare, Edward Thomas, W H Davies and, more recently, my much-missed friend, Roger Deakin, and the
nature writer, Robert Macfarlane.

As Macfarlane observes, “Paths are the habits of the landscape. They are acts of consensual making….They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.”

Edward Thomas believed that paths record the impressions of all who pass along them:

“…heavy is the tread
Of the living: but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering”

‘Poems and Paths’ is written in the firm belief that, when traversing the pathways of the land and the pathways of the mind, it is always better to travel hopefully than to arrive.