Recovered Memories
My daughter found a bag in the basement of a house in which we used to live in France some years ago and has just given it to me. It contains an old poetry notebook of mine from more than 30 years ago (some years before she was born!), containing dated handwritten first drafts and random thoughts. (No mobile phones or mass personal computers then 😉 ). The bag also had loads of photos I took on a Ricoh pre-digital era SLR camera, including many I took after breaking into Greenham Common USAF base in broad daylight to photograph the bunkers there which housed cruise missiles. I took a lot of risks in those days. Guess nothing’s changed! 😀
The front cover of one of my poetry notebooks from the 1980s, “Poèmes et Pensées”.
One of the poems in the notebook, entitled “The Cleansing”, written to a friend who’d had an abortion when she was an early teenager and still felt anguish about it in her 30s when I knew her (and was then her lover). [Sidenote: the word “awesome”, in the days when I wrote this poem, did not have the rather silly meaning which it has now (when even an ice-cream can be described as “awesome”!). The original meaning of the word denotes a terrible and/or humbling sense of gravity when faced with an overwhelming situation]
The Naked Troubadour 