Poems of our Natural World

I make visits up the great Essequibo to rest the body, refresh the mind and remind the soul of the beauty in this world. We should travel more in our land. We are blessed to live in a country where the glories and fascinations and variety and sheer amplitude of nature are so bounteous. Indelibly engraved in my memory of wondrous places are the marvellous savannahs of the Rupununi and the mountainscapes in the far distance as sunset deepening to gold makes them magnificent. A poem wrote itself in my mind.

The Golden Barns of God

Life has been long and good but it is not forever.

I will not come again to the savannahs out of the green, beloved trees root-red streams we passed, the silvered banks I will not see again this far horizon where the great rock silos rise thunder of the Gods around them.

Is there meaning in what we are and do?

Ah, the end and purpose of all creation! Endless time has brought this to my eyes: the wild winds throwing the birds the air becoming marvelously bright the large sun sinking to the very edge and end of the world the golden barns of God ablaze.

How variously lovely is Guyana! Indeed, I do not have to go far to see the beauty. Most afternoons I take a book and sit beneath the green canopy of trees in our garden by a flower-embowered fountain amidst a grove of hibiscus and bougainvillea and red and yellow ixora with curious orchids climbing on a nearby trellis of green wood.

Then there is beauty enough for the day bestowed by Nature or by God, take your pick, as the light goes from bright to silver-blue to golden to a darkening crimson to purple to pitch. And sometimes the wind rises, bringing rain and that also is beautiful because there is nothing sweeter than the smell of sudden rain on parched earth and grass. And always there are the hummingbirds. They come at dusk and hover and dart among the flowering plants. Counterpoint to their quick, brilliant, silent shimmering is the rustle and caterwauling of the green parrots settling in the tops of the trees overhead. Sometimes when there is a moon I wait for its light to silver the whole garden before going inside.

But for a different, larger beauty travel up the Essequibo and stay a few days and star-filled nights and forget about the rest of your life for a while. We were there not long ago, my wife and I, staying with her brother and his wife at their lovely place on the bank of the Essequibo just below Bartica. In that quiet haven, which they have developed step by sensible step into a perfect river home, life slows to an unfrenzied balance after the pace and hustle of daily getting and spending. The body relaxes and the mind composes a deeper view of what is important. I have a place there where I sit and read on a niche of white sand between rocks in the shade of a tree on the river’s edge. The sounds of wind in the forest trees and wind on the water blend into a sense of what it is like to be at peace. The hours pass and the shadows shift beneath the tree and the flooding and the ebbing tide moves the shining of the water into a myriad of shapes and colours. And it has been like this for ten thousand years. And I am privileged.

Gratitude for such beauty and extraordinary peace gradually focuses the imagination and a poem which tries to express the wonder and the thanks emerges.

The Comfort of All Things

I went out for an evening swim alone a perfect pendant of lightning blazed deep in a far thunder-head as I walked.

I was astonished how it lit the world revealing smallest details I would have missed now they really exist. I pick a stone up, feel it, smell the wet dirt, rub it clean its shape is marvelously unique

I wrap it in a gold leaf I have also noticed walk on, wind rising over the wide water the ancient lantern of the moon aloft for aeons gone and to come, the river washing and retreating, swaying in the vertigo of time. Immensities surround me, infinity of sky swimming a long way out, full of peace

I think how old I am compared with the stars.