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My knot was tied just right.
Loose mooring hitch for a while,
Sunny day clouds of white and blue.
What pulled the rope’s release?
My knot was tied just right.
Hemp trailing in the sea,
My hair is wet and unbound,
I am lost and so set free.
My knot was tied just right.
Selke, please swim with me.
Selke, I shall sing for you,
Sunny day clouds of white and blue.
My knot was tied just right.
My hair is wet and unbound.
I am lost and so set free.
What pulled the rope’s release?
My knot was tied just right.
Hemp trailing in the sea,
Loose mooring hitch for a while,
Sunny day clouds of white and blue.
My knot was tied just right.
Selke, I shall sing for you.
Selke, please swim with me.
.
.
Bear … 06.03.2014
â“’ Bearspawprint 2014
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bearspawprint 
Yes, you are so right Bear, “Poetry requires a thinking sort of empathy”. This poem makes me dream of swimming. We are always longing for both land and sea all the time. Are we not? What about those who have never seen the sea? 🙂
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I used to know people who had never seen the sea. They had never traveled and didn’t care to take the time away from family and work. They were contemporaries of my Grandmother. Mountain people who had small or large holdings, which they farmed. No vacations from that sort of farming. They would have been terribly homesick to travel for more than the distance of a few hours away. WW I and WWII changed that. By the time I came along and went visiting with my Grandmother, most of these old people had passed away. But a few still were there, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, living without electricity in the ways that were comfortable to them.
Do you have memories of people who had never been far from their childhood homes?
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Really fascinating. Probably easier to concentrate on what is important like that. On the other hand, bad luck if you are stuck with a mean lot. Maybe fewer mean lots when living like that? 🙂
There are plenty of people living in poverty who do not know what the sea is or people who have heard tales of lands with masses of active salt water. I met many people, especially growing up, who knew of the sea and wished to experience it.
People who have never been far from their childhood homes, there are plenty in third world countries. A lot of them for example can hear that the cities offer gold and happiness. Others can hear that cities give disease and unhappiness. Superstition and misinformation can move people or keep them put.
I never could understand the people I met who had never left their childhood homes or home towns. Now I do. 🙂
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I suspect there were fewer mean lots when there were fewer people. The rotten sorts were more isolated … like everybody else and they couldn’t find each other to clump together into a mean lot group. Now it is too easy for them to find each other and coalease into gangs, para-militia, militia, and even pseudo governments, and real governments with militaries. Also, if they were feeling bloody, they could just out and kill something. Now it festers, and festers in groups.
The people I knew, were good hearted, generous, hospitable, and kind. And funny!!! Lots of laughter. It depends on whose standards are used to determine if they were poor. During the early years after high school, I was 17 when I started university. I was poor, by anyone’s standards, but I traveled. I hitch-hiked and hopped trains and walked/hiked. During that time I met more people, who gave me rides and shelter and cooked, who had never been more than 100 miles from home. Mostly rural peoples of all sorts of ethnic back grounds. They wanted to hear my stories rather than tell theirs:-)
I mostly avoided urban areas, but there were hostels is some cities and I was glad to see them. Winnipeg, Toronto, Houston, Denver, San Jose all had youth hostels that I remember, and zero in rural areas. The Yukon High Way from Vancouver to Alaska was not paved and still was serpentine curved, left over from WWII to avoid strafing. I traveled the whole thing to Alaska, camping out all the way. That was the olden days. There were people in the Yukon who had not traveled, mostly indigenous (I learned some new (new to me) ways to sing … there was only one dirt road .. The Yukon High Way. The world is a different place now with a billion more people.
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“The rotten sorts were more isolated”. Lol 🙂 Wowee. What an incredible time it must have been. Simply hitch-hiking and learning the world without information overload. How noisy could it be?
And a dirt road highway. 🙂
Thank you for sharing Bear. Have you written some posts about that time? 🙂
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1,910 km (Wiki) of dirt Alaskan Highway, which I was calling the Yukon Highway, ’cause that is were most of it is. I turned around just inside Alaska because it was mid August by then and I could see the snow a little lower on the mountains each day ad I was NOT prepared for a long winter. My hiking friend D.M, who later became a federal prosecutor, and I traveled back south to Florida and university through Montana … all dusty back roads and cowboys. I had three other major trips of thousands of miles, two alone, one with a hiking friend M., she later moved (defected?) to Cuba.
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Good day Bear 🙂 Just visited your post and found it interesting. Thank you for the link.
Raining quietly here, slightly unimpressed but nothing a cup of tea can’t fix. Have a lovely day. And thank you so for sharing. 🙂
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Hope you enjoyed your tea ….. which was now hours ago … I am back to it, too …:-)
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I probably did. 🙂
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Are you sailing, swimming? Something about the knot? I am terrible with poetry sorry.
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My relatives don’t like most of my poetry because it is ambiguous. They like straight forward to the point, clear, no cryptic anything. Most of what I write can be taken several ways and it is therefore “interactive” in that whichever possible meaning….or a whole new one, is up to the reader.
A mooring hitch is a knot used to secure boats to dock posts temporarily,,, or horses to hitching posts. It has one end of the rope sticking out that can be pulled to release the knot. Trick horses…and sometimes other animals, can be taught to pull the end, which unties the knot.
Dockside, if tied to loosely it will come undone, especially if the end is trailing in the water.
Selke is a mythical female seal creature. She can take off her seal skin and be a woman on land, and as long as she keeps the seal skin she can put it back on to return to the sea as a seal. She always longs for both land and sea.
Hemp is used to make the (used to be used) the best nautical ropes.
Wet hair unbound indicates that at some point the speaker is in the water.
That she wants to sing to a selke and wants the selke to swim with her indicates …. well that is up to you.
Thank you for taking time to try to sus out meaning. In the side-bar (for now) is a song from the movie Secret Of Roan Inish, the lyrics are in Irish, and at least partly humorous, but it does make good background music while reading this particular poem 🙂
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🙂 ah the joy of understanding
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The mooring post ….. to which the hemp rope is tied with a mooring hitch knot, could be sanity……………(pause to think about that)………………….. a relationship (US slang for getting married is getting hitched) Hmmmm……….or some other attachment, such a life itself…………….or all of them together or perhaps something only you are aware of 🙂
The loosely tied knot hints at intention, or was it tied tightly and someone else loosened it with intention?
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Thanks for this. Reading you poem now makes perfect sense.
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It would only make sense to you, if you have felt something similar yourself.
Poetry requires a thinking sort of empathy.
I wonder if there is a beautiful German word for that?
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Goosebumps. Not fair;) Wise lady with magic words….mmmm… Let me think.
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