Bridges of log we hopped across,
A rogue band of children,
playing at war.
War that started as a game, but soon an aftershock became.
We will always remember the waving of our flags;
little more than coloured rags.
Into the woods, wooping, leaping
the trees were marked by the image of our dreaming.
“The wild we were”, scratched into our souls.
The wild we were, and were becoming once more…
In moments,
when trodden down,
to our bare, brittle fragility,
we looked up to a figure of maternity.
Little older than ourselves,
but bolder than the wolves.
A fierce young female,
swung down from the branch of a tree,
she told us we should live our lives
even if we didn’t want to,
for in death,
we’d get relief.
She told us there was something more going on,
and that we were at the cusp of it.
That to live,
was to incubate,
those last shreds of consciousness.
That to survive,
was to keep alive,
something called imagination.
Most of us knew,
deep down, of what she spoke,
when we looked out onto the world of factions,
the sparse villages that remained,
trapped in violence, trapped in hate.
Our neigbours; bitter, bruised souls,
who snarled and showed their teeth,
if we so much came near,
their bread
or rubbish heap.
Those who chased us children,
through the forests,
through the streets.
We knew somehow,
What was left of our kind,
was beyond a state of madness.
So this prowling, brilliant woman,
with flowers in her hair,
and knives in her socks,
sang us to sleep at night
and wailed us awake in the morning,
to fight this war,
of young and old,
of sane and crazed.
One day it all got too much
The despair came slamming
Almost crushed
We sat around the fire,
not a word was spoke.
The flames filled that gap,
oh, how they spat.
It seems the stars above had pity,
and poured out melancholy light.
On that night,
the warrior girl rose again,
this time, softly.
The voice of poetry washed away our struggle with reason.
We let go,
of the grappling with why,
and together we cried.
We let our hearts break,
then we sat among,
the shards and shattered pieces.
It was only after the flames had become embers,
that we began to piece,
our hearts back together,
and raise our rags once more.
As we gazed out over the hilltops
that murky, clouded dawn,
a new solemnity hit.
This land we inhabited,
at the edge of the world,
was the last place left,
where our kind met.
Civilisation had come and gone.
All we had now,
were the stories.
Stories of a madness,
which had plagued them ’til the end.
Once festered in the mind,
had extended into hand.
The hand that brandished guns,
dangled keys,
cracked whips.
The hand that beat the land down,
to something flat, empty, brown.
They turned the multitudinous biotic intricacy
Into a plane devoid of mystery,
They extinguished the magic.
They did it,
because they had forgotten.
Forgotten what they came from.
Forgotten what they were.
Forgotten all was one,
and one was love.
In blindness,
they became separate,
fragmented.
They turned to fear, to violence, to thirst.
At first
within,
then without.
What raged thereafter,
was the result of that.
The initial cause of the flood,
the initial cause of the drought.
Some of them kept the old stories,
some of them sung the old songs,
some of them even began to pray,
to old and ancient gods.
When all did collapse,
Man retreated to the cracks.
The few that survived,
Were neither the tough nor the wise,
but those
who had somehow,
remembered.
They joined their hands together,
strung their heartstrings in a braid,
Their message rang so clearly:
‘There is no need to be brave.’
Nothing much remained,
among the rubble and the rot,
The cities underwater,
The air mercilessly hot.
Magnetically they congregated
and began to travel North,
towards the last remaining landscape,
that wasn’t barren,
wasn’t scorched.
These survivors were our parents,
who sought a decent home.
They brought us babes on their backs,
and died,
before we got grown.
They were the artists and the fairies,
the gypsies and the poets.
From the illness of the old world,
they became pilgrims of the light,
Travelled miles across the mountains,
So that we would know delight.
Indeed we flounced and flourished,
among poppies, pine and streams.
As children we could not grasp,
how rare,
to so easy, breathe.
Coughing, spluttering, aching,
Our parents, on hammocks hung.
Dying of diseases,
the dying world had bequeathed them young.
They gave us not a promise,
not a mission,
nor wise words.
They left us only with a memory,
to guide us into eternity,
to remind us what we were…
“The wild we were The wild we were The wild we’ll always be,
The wild we are,The wild we are, Fractured, Whole, At peace.”
Hannah Fitzpatrick 