Travel

The everyday art of leaving and arriving

©Adam Woods

The view from the room I’m staying in while away from home. Travelling.

And at that table in the photograph, I’m writing a poem about the islands you can see in the distance. Not exactly about them, more using them as a representation of stillness, or solidity. That despite the human comings and goings of travel, they remain rooted in their space. I hope to finish* that poem soon (it’s currently going under the title of ‘Islands of Silhouettes’) and will post it here when I do.

And writing it put me in mind of an earlier poem I wrote - about the sensation of travel from the perspective of leaving. The feelings, apprehensions and desires provoked by the prospect of travel.

In a way, all our days can be marked by leaving, of finding the new around us, of leaving the usual. If we have the eyes for it. Poetry for me can help capture these sensations, and the deeper feelings that travel can provoke, in a way that my journals, in recording the everyday memories of sights and sounds, don’t.

So I share it here, and interested to hear your relationship to travel - whether that’s the everyday sensations of newness you can find in your commute or in your home or whether you need to succumb to the pull of the extraordinary, through outward travel?

Enjoy!

*finishing a poem is a imprecise term - in a way they are all unfinished…

Vacating

A list of things to pack, assembled accessories
(Like I’m taking a small home with me -
To make where I’m going feel like home)
Deflecting the about-to-travel anxiety.

And then.  There is a pause.  All boxes ticked.
Bags in the hallway - kitchen cleared.
And suddenly I’m in-between.  Caught in a time
Before I go, but maybe I’ve already left.

I look around my still home, as if I’m not here
And wonder about what if I left here for ever
And not have that table, those plants, 
These fond photos to frame my life?

What if I’m now on a bus in Albuquerque,
Drunk in the nowness of travel, released
From this familiar pattern of house and habit 
Feeling excited and equally scared?

What would these standing stones of my life - 
This cup, that chair, the damp patch on the wall - 
Be without a me to enjoy them and make 
Them moments of joy and remembering?

I feel the chill draught of time pass right through me
Acknowledging how little I’ve ventured beyond;
In vacating this previousness, and surrendering to  
New possibility, a making of potential and loss.



© Adam Woods
Teddington, August 2024