A life I’ve lived before?
Or just a summer lore?
These Cumbrian hills that float past me
Fade away, misty, like a memory
If greens could speak of all they hold
Unbroken sap, unspoken, old
Unwoken, untapped, a silent audience
Events absorbed in quiet clairaudience
What tales untold of eras lost
Would now unfold, unthawed of frost
Unbound by dust; behold, forever green
The mist has parted as though it had never been
Ullswater, whose water first watered your past
Whose feet were those that were the last
To tread that dry ground that is now your wet floor
Before that time vanished foreverevermore?
The boatride, like a gentle slide, into a strange intuition
A short sad season of startling fruition
Goodbye again, Watervalley, deep within your heart
Remember still my footsteps, there they did start
Mist and misty, mistier than thought
Misty mysteries yet they are not.
A heart is a storehouse of long forgotten memories
That sometimes arise cloaked as imagined stories
What do I have more precious than my heart,
My past’s library, my future’s chart.
Silently we walk, simple human beings
Yet mightier each than the sum of all worldly things.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
(One of my Lake District poems)
I have been there and I appreciate the way you captured the beauty of the Lake District in most of your poems about it. Thank you .
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Thank you too, Ebun. I appreciate your readership very much. In my Lake District poems I did not focus so much on describing the Lake District itself (there are descriptions galore about it) as I did not conveying the feelings, thoughts and intuitions awakened inside me by the magic and beauty of the place.
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I have to agree with Deanabo, your words are brilliant and speak of so much more than telling! 🙂
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Thank you too. You are most kind…
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Your words are brilliant.
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Not as brilliant as yours, Deana. You flow.
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Thank you my friend.
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🙂
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I LOVE this!
“Silently we walk, simple human beings
Yet mightier each than the sum of all worldly things.”
Powerful. And the hills do see and hold so much, don’t they?
Also, silly question: How exactly do you pronounce your last name? I can think of a few different ways…
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Hi Jessica… 🙂
well, this poem is from my book “Cumbrian Lines: Poems inspired by the Lake District”.
I wrote it (them) during a visit to the Lake District (North England) in 2008. Have you ever been there? I actually wrote this poem while sitting on that boat on Lake Ullswater 🙂
Pronounce this way:
Ahkah Tehrahkah…
(does that help?) – and thank you for asking, thanks for reading and for being interested 🙂
http://www.amazon.com/Cumbrian-Lines-Poems-inspired-district/dp/3943000311
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