On poetry and the innocence of the unconditioned mind

I wrote my first poem when I was six or seven, I can’t remember exactly which, it’s so long ago, but I do remember that my Mum has the newspaper clipping somewhere. One of the few things she kept from the mass of creations that children make and which cluttered the attic for a long time, because of my Dad’s desire to hold on, until my Mum won out and made space in the house.

“Little bird in the city”, I believe it was called. Something about a lonely bird flying high across the cityscape, which I can only guess in my childlike imagination wasn’t about Leicestershire where I grew up.

I doubt, from experience that as children we locate ourselves geographically. We live outside and beyond such artificial confines and borders for a blissful and blessed time, the time that precedes the interference of politics and society and culture.

Significantly, gladly, I don’t recall being overly aware or concerned about the place I occupied, in terms of where I was. That all came later, when I was circumstantially compelled to become conscious of my place in the world, or rather, what other people determined it to be, and where other people decided I shouldn’t be or where I didn’t belong.

At that tender age where life was lived in the imagination, in the free and sunny place of the relatively unconditioned mind, I dreamt of birds and flight, of bears and clouds, of make believe friends, who in hindsight, were probably a lot more comforting and reliable than some of the ones I ended up making in the early years of my real life.

It would be wholly true to say that for much of that happy time, to paraphrase Hemmingway, that books and words were the best friends I had.

Although I did have a melancholic side to me, already. Anthropomorphising about this particular bird, the subject of my ditty, being lonely, imagining why a singular bird that I had likely seen glide across the skies above my childhood home was unaccompanied by a flock.