A Gentling Language
A country is not known by maps alone,
nor by a brochure of renowned façades:
cathedral, harbour, monument, museum,
each entered, ticked, and left behind.
A tour may gather every celebrated stone
and still return the traveller unchanged,
for wonders, placed in untidy succession,
become a market\'s busy clamour.
But there are guides who understand another art.
They may lead first to narrow streets where
old brick reads the afternoon, then
to squares whose fountain answers
something always left unsaid.
From there, a garden.
From garden to a hill.
From the hill, to sea’s distant line.
Each view enlarging the last.
What seemed a fountain
becomes a lesson in patience.
What seemed a garden
becomes a chapter on return.
What seemed the sea
reveals the meaning of a road.
And when travellers at last stand
upon the country\'s highest overlook,
the landscape speaks in a single voice,
assembled from deliberate arrivals.
So moves a gentling language.
Not by piling image upon image
as cargo stacked upon a quay,
but by placing one thought
within the reach of another;
until a metaphor recalls a question,
whose query discovers an absence,
a leave, in turn seeking light,
whence brilliance becomes dwelling.
Then the poem is no longer scenery.
It is an itinerary of recognitions,
a sequence of chosen thresholds
through which the mind is quietly conducted
toward a thesis too large for any solitary line to bear:
that meaning arrives
not all at once,
but as a country slowly
unfolding,
each horizon
preparing the next.
.