Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself”, Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, “then you are a thousand years ahead of your time.”
Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. “What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?”
A long silence, “Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anyone who wanted to discover it; that’s got nothing to do with time. We’re ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.”“That’s something,” Jonathan said, rolling to glide inverted for a while. “That’s not half as bad as being ahead of our time”.
Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The Seagull Speaks Creative Commons Copyright

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Stradbally, County Kerry - August 2009

Here is a podcast of me reading this poem



Through thin clouds,
The star light shines,
Colliding with mountain sides,
Devoid of flesh,
 Sliding on scarred scree slopes,
Like broken bones.

 Into the heart,
Along vessels carrying blood,
Pumping for millennia,
Eroded by ice and time,
But alive to storms,
And dancing sunbeams,
And tormenting, torrential rain.

A full moon hangs above Stradbally,
A loving, luminous eye.

 And the children sleep,
In the back seat,
Oblivious to the knife-edged ridge,
Of the eternal now,
And the ancient starlight,
Ending its journey on their wind-blown faces.


Photo from MountainViews
http://mountainviews.ie/mv/index.php?mtnindex=42

This poem was written while on holiday on The Dingle Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland in 2009. We were driving at night 'with the children in the back seat', The silhouette of Stradbally Mountain dominating the skyline ahead. It was a beautifully crystal clear August night.




No comments:

Post a Comment