SPRING TIDES

I’ve been trying to write a poem about the way things change. It’s taking me forever, and not for the usual coming-back-to-it-and-realising-it-doesn’t-scan reason, no sir, not this time.

I think it’s just too deep and raw a thing to capture in my usual glib verse. Ah. Let me rephrase. What I mean is: I’m not good enough at poetry to write it properly. Yes, that’s it: it’s like a cartoonist trying to turn Paradise Lost into a comic strip.

I say deep and raw because right now, change is causing me trouble. Not that I don’t want that change; more that it’s rushing in like a spring tide. It’s deep - it will swathe into every inch of sand and pebble on my beach, and it’s raw because it is cold and wet and will reshape pretty much everything. And some of that is painful.

Let me be more specific if I may. I’m losing a friend because, I think, change is happening, and the loss of that friendship really hurts. He might read this, I suppose. I don’t want to give him away for that reason, but I do want to say that it’s a tough time to go through, right in the middle of a rather wonderful one. Life’s like that hey? Bittersweet at best.

I really do still love my friend, and there will be a point when this starts to heal, I know. But I suspect there’ll still be scars even where there’s healing. That is the way of things, after all.

Meanwhile I’ll try to get back to my poem about change. I don’t ever want to be so inflexible, so tied to my own sense of knowledge and experience that I’m blind to new seasons or directions of travel. I’m seeing how important it is to know the seasons, to listen and learn from others, to find out what’s happening and respond well, particularly to young people.

And in my own season of spring tide, I want to be ready, excited, prepared for the adventure about to engulf my world! And honestly, I think my friend would want that for me too. And if he does happen to be reading this, then he should know that I absolutely would never want anything other than that adventure for him either, with or without me.