Lost and Found; an exploration

Wandlebury ring, an ancient earthwork near my home

Here is a little poem, another sonnet, in which I am trying to feel my way through the intuition that there is something delimiting and stultifying about the way our knowledge, our self awareness, our very location on the globe are all expressed nowadays through networks, web locations, universal resource locators. A poem which began with the need to slip past these meshes, go offline, and feel for a knowledge that cannot be digitised ended in a meditation on fruitful darkness, via negativa, finding God in absence and otherness. Here it is, for what its worth, I present it, fully embracing the irony that this poem about escaping ‘the wireless meshes of tenacious networks’, comes to you wirelessly over just such a network. But perhaps it will encourage you, like me, to be sometimes unplugged and offline, to be earthed instead to the unearthly.

As always you can hear it by clicking on the title or the play button

Lost and Found

Slip past the scanners and creep in between

The wireless meshes of tenacious networks,

Stay with the mystery, remain unseen,

Unfindable behind these shadowed earthworks.

Wait till the waves are gone, the way is clear,

The one location, always unlocated,

The last of earth, is always somewhere near.

Time out of time, uncounted and undated,

Awaits you there, but you must come unknown

Through your own shadow, crouched and hushed and deathly.

You lose the light, and find yourself alone,

Feeling your way beyond the only path

Through that dark wood, until you catch your breath

And your lost heart is earthed to the unearthly.