A Walk with Dorothy Wordsworth
We read the landscape left to right; and then, as in the East, from right to left.
We did not speak. One cannot speak and read.
At the cottage in the heat of day, we talked over what we had observed. I could see composing in her eyes. We walked again in the evening.
Two hundred years later, when I read her journal, the landscape was finally legible to me.
Palaver
I am the guardian of a word, it was given me at birth. I have not yet discovered it.
Time was, poets kept all our words. But prophets saw the risk should poets be taken. And then they were.
Like seeds, the words they had distributed were kept in wallets, in lockets, sewn into clothing, hidden in houses and in strongboxes buried in gardens. But then we lost the houses, the gardens, wallets, lockets and clothing.
Words given to children scattered. I have one. Someday I will walk under a palaver tree and speak it.