Week 2 of Walking beyond words generated a poetry collage that demonstrated how meanings can shift dramatically through the choice of layering. The single word ‘Earthquake’ contributed from a walker in Turkey and used by another participant as the title of the poem, injected a friction into other people’s words. When words are gifted, how gently do we tread? These walks about our smallness and the interconnectedness of everything must inevitably take us beyond the walk as a relaxing, reflective activity and into the movement, muddiness and messiness of the earth.
I hoped that the walks would provide a springboard for my individual writing as well as enabling my contribution to the group poem to emerge. The poem ‘Earthquake’ is not yet available for public circulation, but I reflect on the words that I formed together into my own shorter poem:
Walking in step with the pile-driver
Compacting into the earth,
The soles of my feet grow gravity roots
Holding me on the surface of a spinning sphere
Water dilutes earth into slippery mud
A liminal entry point into the ground
Blurring the edge between above and below
An unstable anchor.
Now I can see that the ‘Earthquake’ poem pushes deeper into the stuff that I had already tentatively prodded. The act of collaging the words perhaps has the power to reveal what we did not know was there or to push us deeper into our thinking.
