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• Bracknell Dusk Walkers

Bracknell Dusk Walk in Lily Hill Park and Clinton’s Hill

On Wednesday 9th March (New Moon), the 2nd Bracknell Dusk Walk took place in Lily Hill Park and Clinton’s Hill

Photography Andy Willsher.

Words Scott Farlow.

This project is part of the Laurence Payot’ residency with Bracknell Regeneration Partnership, working with Artscape Management.

 
CLINTON’S HILL
The breathing place project
At Clinton’s Hill.
Stories from the understorey,
Of new pathways and benches and information boards,
And wild/owers and trees and boxes
For beetles and bats and nesting birds.
And the intertwining marriage of pine and oak,
Amongst the birch, the beech and the bluebells.
The smooth stick skewed
Through a loop
In the frayed blue rope,
Sways in the gentle breeze
A tempting umbilical chord
To childhood swinging
And singing and swinging again,
And evoking
Memories of forgotten times,
And lost freedoms,
And the ghosts of people’s past
In the present
Before the clock stops
Leaving laughter in the trees and fallen leaves.
And the proud boy who planted the snowdrops,
And told them the story of Hansel & Gretel
To help them sleep at night.
And the warring tribes of
Wocking-gas and the Bracken,
And the old faces from the old places
And the new people from other places
All subsumed into this new place,
Still a living breathing place,
A thinking space, a changing place with a changing face
Imprinted on the old landscape of the great park
With the beetles, bats, birds and badgers.
And the old deer.

 

NEW MOON

Our satellite is
Out of sight.
Did she take flight
From her borrowed half-light
With Dawn?
Where is she tonight?
We know she is there.
There. But not.

 There,
Continuing
Her march across March
Through the new moon
To the full moon
And back again.
And again.
Again
Unceasingly
She keeps time,
And tide,
And rhythm,
And marks the twilight sky.
Unwittingly – or perhaps not – she inspires
Desires
And fires
Endless fascination.
Yet still
All that is left
Are silent footprints
Of love and fear and madness
And loneliness
And the ebb and flow of the oceans
And the dusts of our imagination.
And hope.

Meanwhile, in shrouded silence,
We now stand together
Apart and beneath the shadows
Watching and absorbing,
Thinking, feeling,
Waiting in the veiled presence
Of her veiled absence
From the inky orange glow.

By Scott Farlow.