(Listen to the poem here)
I cannot find my head at times,
at least I cannot find the thoughts
I thought were in it.
It often happens when I’ve had a day of
reckless people reading speeches, horns a-blaring,
driving words in truckloads through
the middle of my brain, relentlessly at speed.
All my own whimsical and little notions
like wrappers near a busy road,
go flying up, up and away.
As I walk home, near sunset,
I am still busy looking for them in the less gardened
precincts of my mind, among the nettles and the
rambling bushes and the ponds and littered soil.
I walk wound tight in frowns,
hunched up, eyes down and when I come to the hundred
steps which separate me from the last short stretch of road,
I raise my head, something I have not done
for hours, to take them in before I take them on
and up at the top between the linden trees
there are some evenings when the sky is mauve,
magenta, lilac, indigo and violet – all the colours
at the rainbow’s end – so taut that if one had
hands and fingers long enough one could reach out and
just by grazing them produce a chord
which I don’t have the power to imagine
but which would ring out so and for so long that people would
forget their doings, drop their change, discard their penny feuds as well
and come from over hills and lakes and rivers
for miles around, for hours they would come
walking through the night, long-stride
after long stride, wide-eyed,
with thoughtful faces guided by this
sound astounding chiming, rhyming
with the marrow in their bones
and on arriving they would cock their heads
to listen to the black tree boughs
still tingling with harmonics
and sit round fires, pore over picture books
and photographs and sift through bags of names
of things and feelings and relationships and attributes
and look at each other in a web
of glances inside which
we would ask ourselves-
What is it? What is that simple little
thing which somewhere we have all forgotten ?
Phillip Hill 2007
(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available from
- Amazon.com (paperback)
- Amazon.co.uk (paperback)
- Barnes&Noble (e-book)
- Lulu (paperback or e-book)
Sideways Station 