Bold Street Writers..a group still meeting at The Gateway on Sankey Street each Thursday morning as it has done in various places for 30 years.
A prompt from Pat Lightfoot for the day one word ..."Travelling" and we wrote for an hour before reading aloud our literary attempts.
I thought of those who take pilgrimages whether sacred or secular. There is a route for walkers and pilgrims taken from Land's End to John o Groats. And knowing of one who has done this recently...set me off on these words....
That they could remember a day with rain falling in diamond sheets
And sun breaking through grey skies painting lime green on autumn fields.
Rivers swollen racing over black rocks and tumbling waters over old clay.
Their's alone the joy of alder and reeds as they journeyed as travellers.
They were like foot soldiers marching through unknown lands
Toward
they knew not what yet they made no questioning.
Only the travelling became the important aspect in their lives.
Sunrise to sunset each step on yet another path covering the miles
Facing north and wondering at a land of rock and fields of moss.
Ducking heads at low branches in dark forests where each tree
Was a guardian of unknown shadows. Travellers they were not
At the start, but travellers they became with each mile that passed.
If a final place was to be sought as they envisaged at the start of all
That became less and less important, than the travelling itself.
Their travelling became a place out of time, out of season, out of history.
Like another land, it would be hard to point to a time when it changed.
But change it did...............and that changed everything.
