My childhood sphere was pastureland
and the pebbled riverside:
broad enough for a bold imagination.
It was a gorse-bush maze
a weir
a tunnel
and the old Victorian train station.
It was bounded by the blue hills
far beyond
which measured out
the limits of the known world.
Back in those long-forgotten days
a long-forgotten child
wondered what secrets these mountains held, untold.
I travelled to those blue hills on the bus
one day in May
solo adventuring
on the threshold of adulthood, seeking something
though what, I cannot well precisely say
I yearned: an untamed heart within me burning.
What I found there was nothing short of heaven: nothing short
I’d skip off school to spend time in the wild.
Restraining ropes of expectation
had not yet been wrought
To tame this sylvan spririt, flower-child.
These memories remain, my childhood sphere
imagination – let me linger here.
© Experimentsinfiction 2021, All Rights Reserved
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This is not a sonnet in the strict sense, as I haven’t stuck to the rhyme scheme and metre, but it is intended to be sonnet-like, with the volta at the end. Just flicking back through the memory files and remembering my childhood in Cumbria.
Sharing with earthweal’s Open Link Weekend.