Misty In Cambridge This Morning

Not only was it misty, someone had gone around and edged the leaves in white and put little dots of white along the veins of the leaves.

Which reminds me of a poem, half remembered that I wrote when I was about fifteen. My parents, grandparents and I would go out in the car. We lived a long way from the countryside, and really it would not have made much difference had we been nearer. You could drive in the countryside and you could get out in a lay-by and eat sandwiches and drink tea from a flask. But you couldn’t get into the countryside, not really into it. This is England: You couldn’t and you cannot just get out and walk.

Well, you could if you went to a National Park, but they don’t grow on trees. So I wrote this poem that was odd really because I am not sure exactly what it was speaking to. I don’t remember the whole poem, but it was a series of records of things you could see in the countryside, in nature. I remember the very end of the poem because of the last two lines.

So imagine the poem started with a line about what you could see. Then there was a list of things, and then the penultimate line, the last in the list of things you could see, was something like ‘the veins on a leaf caught in the sunlight’, and then the last line.

So the poem went something like this:

You can see
….
….
The veins on a leaf caught in the sunlight
But not through a car window.