Impressions from the William Blake Garden 26.10.08

‘Unorganised innocence: Impossibility. Innocence dwells with wisdom, but never with ignorance.’  William Blake

 

I went to the William Blake Garden today

And I saw what I never had seen before

 

An audience of parents with small children

Camping on the floor below the wooden stage

A woman with braided sandy hair holding a guitar

Singing low and mellow

Like mother earth-

The voice of hope

And the words of death

 

I was pushed in the waters of Blake’s dichotomy

Of Innocence and Experience

Still here I am struggling to catch my breath

On paper

 

This seemingly comfortable environment

Who was it for?

Children?

Parents?

Or the people in between just like me

Slowly wondering through

The corridors of life?

 

Still today

I saw what I never had seen before

A funeral of my own childhood

A shrinking Neverland

Locked up in some wooden memory box

 

So I asked myself

Is the loss of childhood really that tragic?

Are we really just getting older but not wiser?

And to my left-

On the floor

A pair of golden boots stood next to a woman

She had a gentle angelic smile

On her face

And a little boy under her arm

 

To me

She seemed content…

 

Still the atmosphere in the Garden

So vividly exemplified a clash of two different worlds

Desperately feeding off one another

That I couldn’t help wondering whether

There and then

We were all characters in one of his songs