Make the best you can of it.
- Wendell Berry
We moved in silence, my bicycle and I. We accepted what came.
He zigzagged the field with a football. Single handed he kept the game going by scoring as well as guarding the goal. I approached him as I would a deer grazing. Then -
“Did you watch the game between England and USA?
He nodded.
“Exciting?”
He nodded.
“Which team?” I said, “the US?”
He shook his head. “Wayne Rooney!”
“Me too,” I said. And nodded.
In the Castle grounds I walked among foreign voices. I wanted to be the traveller with new eyes. To see outside of the ordinary.
“Ghee, I can’t stand those cobbled stones!”
A lady with chunky thighs and tiny shoes wobbled through the courtyard.
“Me neither!” Her friend’s face was red and puffy.
“I told you it was this way!”
His voice was high, his body short. He wore a powder blue hat. It made him look just those millimeter taller. Even so, his wife still had to look down at him.
Then, as a dark force, a lanky man with a red scarf and a red umbrella. He rushed past, his overcoat dancing from side to side. I turned just in time to catch him leave into the light of the archway.
I listened to the sounds of the city. I let the world enter me. The more I opened my eyes, the more the noise disappeared into the silence.
Quote from How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
Text and Photos © Grete S. Kempton
