Friday 28 September 2012

Journeys With Words




This week Write on Edge asks for “A little break this week from storytelling.

It's the beginning of autumn, the students are back in the classrooms, and at Write on Edge our thoughts are turning to our dreams and ambitions. This week we want to hear about your writing goals. Take three hundred words and tell us about where you want to take your writing.”
I took 289. To see how other writers handled the prompt, please click on the link.
***
I want to take my writing
into myself, to explore my thoughts and feelings and 
out 
into the world of marvels and magic. I want it to echo
shouts and whispers; savour sweet, sour and bitter; to shiver, and sweat, wonder and fear: to thrill.

I want it to sniff
the freshness of dawn's dew, recoil at putrefaction's stench. Delight.

I want us to travel
on a packed and dusty train, lurching across the Sub-Continent's reaches on a narrow-gauge track;
to slither
through a spider-veiled jungle that sparkles with the eyes of hidden monkeys.

I want it to propel me
across a crevass-crossed glacier whose blue-white ice waves shiver and groan and crack.

I want it to drag me
into the memory of aqua-melting-to-royal-deepening-to navy-fading-to-black depths of the sea, where gold-fish flit between sunlight and shadow and sharks and barracuda circle in the deep.




I want to follow it
back to the emptiness of the desert, where heat waves bounce between black granite and red and the sun chases a patch of shade around the thorns of acacias and the nights' campfires send  shadows flickering across canyon walls.

I want to tramp behind my words
through city streets as they catch the eyes of bankers and cleaners, shysters and shop girls and service dogs, and peck breadcrumbs with pigeons – in the rain, under the sun, through drizzle, uncertain predawn, and twilight.

We will follow
cart tracks and super highways and goatpaths that wind through Mediterranean scree where the scents of bruised thyme and sage dog our footsteps and caper bushes clutch at our legs.

I want to take
my words to the farthest reaches of swirling space – all emptiness and supernova.

And deep into the kasbah of your heart.