Youth hostelling in Normandy

Poem by Roger Iredale

The Paris gendarme whimsically dropped
round David’s neck a garland he’d found,
and waved us on. We pedalled stoically
over Normandy as wind plucked cuffs
and panniers, barns hosted us.
Till one night, sleeping in a ruined
chateau guarded by a ghostly widow,
who led us down dark corridors of dust,

we heard the forest rise in tumult.
It was not the wind among the trees,
branches scraping window panes
nor angry giants out of Norway
or Iceland’s fells disgorging trolls.
It was Spring’s first revelation, swelling
roots and fibres in the writhed earth
surging northwards into other lands.

We heard the Spring’s colossal pupa
break out in fantasies of birds and
gaping throats, saw molehills struggle up,
fine claws scuffing tunnels out of soil.
And pedalled over wheatlands
rising into solemn regiments still far away
still only promises of places in the mind,
lives unlived, new territories of time.

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