I ‘listen’ to poetry to hear what speaks to me. Each of us hears a poem in a different way. I have been finding nourishment in these lines from the poem “Somewhere” (from Laboratories of the Spirit, Macmillan 1975) by the Welsh poet R.S.Thomas.
What speaks to you in these lines after reading them slowly?
…the point of travelling is not
to arrive, but to return home
laden with pollen you shall work up
into the honey the mind feeds on.
What are our lives but harbours
we are continually setting out
from, airports at which we touch
down and remain in too briefly
to recognize what it is they remind
us of? And always in one
another we seek the proof
of experiences it would be worth dying for.
…Surely there exists somewhere,
as the justification for our looking for it,
the one light that can cast such shadows?
Where do you find evidence of “the one light that casts such shadows”? Now that you are spending more time at home, do you find yourself using the pollen you have gathered up on your travels in the past, to make honey for your mind to feed on?
