Friday Writings for Randos - INSIGHT

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:

INSIGHT

 by Mairi MacInnes

We plunged down from the summit

      over the slither of scree

till the path jackknifed

      over clints round a baldish moor

and across cloughs sets in its side

      and welded fields, a hundred of them,

with thorns embedded, and into iron 

      woods, faintly aromatic, on a precipice

harboured in boulders taller than Stonehenge,

  till trembling like racehorses 

reined back at the starting gate

      our knees locked, and were agonies

brakes seized, as stones

      bounded downhill ahead and we stayed

upright, controlled: we saw

      behind an optic watering screen

the wood, the lake, perfectly black,

      the railways crossing where the train

twice a day gives its excited yelp.

      then the quite invisible house,

roof first (with turrets perhaps),

      and gate ajar, heads swiveling on sticks

from the balconies as we walked in

      wondering what child would dance out then

to meet us - would we know whose,

      the child we had in mind being yet unborn,

his face appearing only in the night

      his teeth like seed pearls, his eyes

two grains of salt, his hands held out

      for our embrace. Could we refuse the hesitant one,

the one that in fact appeared

      because we were amazed, fatigued or shy

or would we stoop and, heart stopped, anyway

      gather him into our arms.