I have come to the end of my selection of Trevor Hewett poems and have been considering what to do next.
Yesterday I glanced through my copy of "Poems To Last A Lifetime", an anthology of poems chosen by Daisy Goodwin, which I bought last year.
It has given me a few ideas and pointed me towards several poets who I have neglected in the past.
So I have decided to home in on a few of them, beginning with C. Day-Lewis and "Walking Away".
Daisy Goodwin comments:
"This poem should be read by every parent - it is about the realisation that one day your children will walk away from you and that your job is to let them go."
WALKING AWAY
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About natures give-and-take the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire ones irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
C. Day-Lewis
jollyweez
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."
The Prophet Kahlil Gibran