Bordeaux Bay

Bordeaux Bay
Bordeaux Bay by Guernsey-based artist Tony Taylor

Monday 13 April 2020

TRACK RECORD

As the impact of the coronavirus, Covid-19, continues to dominate our lives, I think many are speculating as to how the world, or at least our own little worlds, might be changed when this emergency has passed. 
The poem, Virus Diary, came about following a recent walk through the area of reclaimed land that overlooks Bordeaux Bay. 
I noticed then that, besides the usual well-trodden paths, there were many new, offshoot tracks that had not been there when I walked in the area several weeks earlier.
Clearly, these fresh paths were the result of people trying to avoid meeting others head-on in order to observe ’social-distancing’. 
I saw these new routes as a metaphor for the way that the virus has forced us to find alternative ways of doing things and wondered whether this type of altered and often adventurous thinking will persist when the present crisis ends.










VIRUS DIARY: TUESDAY



Tuesday, for my permitted exercise,
I walked on reclaimed land above the bay:
a quarry once, then land-fill site, today
the coastal landscape has a different guise.
On hilly, weeded tracks, dog-walkers meet
lone runners, lonely trudgers, retirees,
photographers, birdwatchers, families:
a hearty regiment with marching feet
that, by their constant use, collectively,
have tramped broad paths for everyone to share
and up I went on Tuesday for fresh air,
a lock-down-liberated escapee,
to walk familiar trails and view the bay
with low-tide boats lop-sided all along 
and Brent geese congregated, forty-strong,
Herm island, isolated, far away,
itself in lock-down as the islands are,
obedient to authority’s dictates
to keep coronavirus from our gates:
strange times are these that verge upon bizarre. 
I came upon fresh tracks in that landscape,
departures from old, bland, accustomed routes
as though from a dead tree had sprung green shoots:
new trails, signs of avoidance, of escape.
On impulse, I turned left instead of right,
right was the path I never failed to take,
and found myself attentively awake,
newly alert, my body more upright. 
The view was subtly different because
that small shift of direction made it so.
I stood and watched the tide return from low
up through the bay at Bordeaux as it does 
and wondered, on this reconfigured mound,
if we’d resume our former lives unchanged
or choose, instead, a future rearranged 
and stride ahead on fresh trails newly found.

No comments:

Post a Comment