space – Tim O'Hare

An Encounter on Ilkley Moor #poem

It was the morning of the fourth day of July, twenty twenty-three,
and I was running, alone, on Ilkley Moor.
I could not take the path that I had planned,
for it was stolen from me by the grasp of ferns,
and so, instead, I found another way to travel west –
my route, like life, a path of unexpected turns.

As I drew level with a group of trees, planted in my mental map,
I turned to head, almost a scramble, up the rock-strewn slope,
until with the ground flattening all around, I came to a stone wall
and followed a well-worn path that lay in its shadow,
east, towards the radio mast.
From there I knew my way,
down the track they call the Keighley Road,
with a view across the valley over Ilkley town
that, like the passing of a life, would slip away too fast.

As I began my descent, his profile came into view,
to my right, just off the track,
though still some distance well ahead –
a small, dark man, sitting, gazing directly across my path,
chin resting on hands,
elbows propped on knees,
his head straining forwards
as if to peer through time to seek some other space.
He remained there as I closed, his features sharpening in my sight,
and I was struck how, like so much else in life,
his presence was incongruous.
For this did not seem to be his place.

I expected him to move as I approached, if only to shift his pose,
but he sat looking west across the track, across the moor – still.
And as my eyes searched for detail in his form
I saw that he was too small, about two-thirds the size of a man,
and so dark, yet without colour.

My brain was screaming at me: ‘Something is not right here’,
and I felt a heavy weight in the air around me.
I continued on,
towards the point beside the grey stone on which he sat.
My heart was beating fast, preparing to meet another life,
but on my arrival there was no-one there.

(c) Tim O’Hare, August 2023

AN ENCOUNTER ON ILKLEY MOOR: This poem tells the true story of an encounter that I had on a morning run while staying on Ilkley Moor for a week. There was a rock on the verge by the track that I ran along as I made my descent to our holiday let. As I came down the track towards it, I saw the figure of a small, dark man sitting there, just as I describe in the poem, and I instinctively felt that I was not able to recognise all that lay before me. Even now, many months later, I cannot let go of the fact that he was there and that, just for a few moments, either he or I was not in the right place.

Rock Giant #poem

You have used me as you wish to have your fun,
scrabbling roughly on the pockmarked surface of my skin,
climbing high to turn your face towards the sun.
You scrape your boots across me to remove accumulated soil,
and carving your initials in my surface,
give little thought to what you spoil.
You have taken from me what you need
using iron picks to gouge out fragments,
thinking that you caused no pain because you saw no sign I bleed.
You turn your eyes towards me and see only solid rock,
looking down upon my dumbness,
laughing as you mock.

By day, as you approach from the grassy slope below,
you start to notice many shapes of things you know.
You see an outline that reminds you of a faithful hound,
you watch it shift as you move forwards,
then it’s gone without a sound.
You turn to view a castle, but no soldiers move for they have fled.
You move your head to shape a profile –
only then you see the witch’s head.
You trace out furrowed brow, hooked nose and jutting chin;
you feel grey eyes look through you,
and you shiver as an evil spell takes hold within.

At night, in your imagination, led by an unheard call,
you see me rise up from my station as I yawn and stretch so tall.
You hear the distant thunder of my steps
as I march the slowest beat.
You sense vibrations deep below,
the trembling ground beneath my feet.
You are frightened of my power, as I tear the earth apart.
You are petrified, turned solid, as the terror grips your heart.
You are fearful that I come at last to take what I am due.
You sense that it is time.
And you are terrified that I am hunting, hunting now for you.

But none of this is true,
for all that you see, and everything that you imagine,
has been shaped by the stories you were told,
and what they let you do.
Those imagined forms, the wild thoughts,
and all the feelings they produce may seem fantastic
when compared with what is in your normal view.
So, what is the truth?
If only you knew…

I was formed from countless tiny pieces that began as dust,
mixed together in her bowl,
baked by her heat to form a crust.
I was once pressed tight together as I found my solid form,
extruded by her shuddering contractions,
melded in her womb so warm.
I have rested for so long as if I have no task,
snuggled by her mossy blanket,
wrapped protectively within her grasp.
I have waited patiently for several million years,
cooled by her gentle whispers,
washed clean by her falling tears.

For your time is not all time.
Your whole existence is the smallest fraction of my life.
This place was mine so long before you came,
and will remain my home for even longer once you die.

And your space is not all space.
Your whole world is like a single speck of the quartz that shines
within the substance of my form,
just one of countless millions of specks, all of which are mine.

And your thoughts are not all thoughts.
Your thoughts are small and they are fleeting, and so they rarely bend.
You are constrained by what they choose to tell you.
There is so much you cannot comprehend.

And your life is not all life.
Your life is short, and it is fast, and so it limits what you try to claim.
You cannot grasp the unfamiliar.
You are bound by the rules that shape your game.

Believe me, I do not lie.
I do not speak to garner fame.
For beyond all that you can see, and everything that you imagine,
are stories to be told and things to see that far expand your frame.
You may think you are the only one who holds within a spark,
but that is falsehood as we share that conscious flame.
I too am alive,
and Rock Giant is my name.

(c) Tim O’Hare, August 2023

ROCK GIANT: The last few walks that we have done have been on the familiar territory of Dartmoor, taking in one or more of the rocky tors that sit atop many of the hill summits. These enormous piles of granite slabs are the remnants of old volcanoes, material pushed upwards from the upper mantle almost 300 million years ago. I find it impossible to visit a tor without seeing the profiles of faces in the shapes made by the great piles of rocks, or imagining that the rocks are the tip of a toe, an elbow or some other part of a huge stone giant asleep beneath the ground. And then, in a natural progression of my thoughts, those rock giants begin to stir. I am not at all sure why, in the poem, I imagined the rock giant as a threat. My instinct is that they are, in fact, very gentle and friendly creatures. But, of course, I will never really know, because they still have much sleeping to do before they awaken.

Orbital – Samantha Harvey #reading

‘Orbital’, the 2024 Booker Prize-winning novel by Samantha Harvey was the first book that I finished reading this year. I will admit that I am not usually a reader of what might be called ‘literary’ fiction but as this book was fairly short and has a science-based theme (the book recounts the thoughts of a group of astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) as it orbits the Earth over the period of one day), my wife thought it would probably interest me and gave it to me as a Christmas present.

I find books like this, that don’t really have a story as such, quite intriguing. It is interesting to ask the question: What it is that makes spending time with one set of fictional characters doing nothing in particular, apart from existing and thinking, interesting? (especially as it is easy to imagine many instances when it certainly wouldn’t be).

As it turned out, I did enjoy the day I spent with Harvey’s collections of imagined astronauts as they repeatedly observed their home planet (the ISS completes 16 orbits of Earth per day) and mused on their connections with the people, places and events down below. The writing challenges the reader to consider their own place in the world and the perspective from which they view both ordinary and extraordinary events. For me, the core themes that emerged from my reading of Orbital were the extent to which so much of human endeavour is bound up in the pursuit of progress, both the grand-scale technological progress shared only by a few such as the astronauts on the ISS, and the small-scale, day-to-day progress, shared by everyone of us, and the fragility of the world that all of this progress has created.

While gazing down onto the planet’s surface, one of the astronauts muses on this theme of progress in connection with his relationship with his daughter and the passage in the text that captures the stream of his thoughts as he does so was one that resonated deeply for me:

‘But what he meant to say to his daughter – and what he will say when he returns – is that progress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends in the head where it tends to go wrong). It’s a feeling he has almost perpetually when here, in both the biggest and smallest of moments – this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars. A beauty he feels while he vacuums the control panels and air vents, as they eat their lunch separately and then dinner together as they pile their waste into a cargo module to be launched towards earth where it’ll burn up in the atmosphere and be gone, as the spectrometer surveys the planet, as the day becomes night which quickly becomes day as the stars appear and disappear, as the continents pass beneath in infinite colour as he catches a glob of toothpaste mid-air on his brush, as he combs his hair and climbs tired at the end of each day into his untethered sleeping bag and hangs neither upside down nor the right way up, because there is no right way up, a fact the brain comes to accept without argument, as he prepares to sleep two hundred and fifty miles above any ground for their falsely imposed night while outside the sun rises and sets fitfully.‘