The first lines came automatically, from the deeper subconscious, almost a stream of consciousness thing; it was with me the instant of waking, yet not within the poetry notebook until a few days later. Then written as an epigraph, in two lines. Only when typed up and edited did it become the first four line stanza; something about my losing the nerve to be too pretentious.
And in becoming a stanza the vagueness of the double meaning enters the fray; am I talking to the you who is really me, or is the you a past or present lover, or is the you further away, a deity, or its non-religious equivalent. Am I truly trying to mislead, or hoodwink, or beguile; is to be ambiguous my way always; whether by design, or by default.
In the second stanza I bring into play a couple of words from Ray Bradbury’s book The Zen of Writing. He says to look for zest and gusto; these are both words which I have previously used in my own writing. That I am enthusiastic to share these words says something about how important both zest and gusto were at the time. One of my old bosses said that the thing he loved most about me was my enthusiasm, my can do attitude, my great belief that more could be achieved than we might imagine. I took that as a huge compliment; that’s me, zest and gusto.
The third stanza gives a clue as to how long sometimes the poem is in the soup steadily cooking. I talk of meditation and doubt; that is because in our previous meditation sangha I had come across doubt as I meditated. As a non-religious man I had questioned my own faith in myself, as opposed to my being in need of an external faith or force.
The fourth stanza takes me back to memory, several years worth of memory in fact, but culminating in a very recent memory. On our last vacation we stayed in a swish, contemporary, energy-saving villa, almost on the beach, at Widemouth Bay near Bude. Everyday we were able to walk on the beach, beside the wild February Atlantic surf; the hours and hours which we spent taking photographs and writing are now condensed into these four short lines, indeed only the last two lines are specific to that time.
