Letting Go (A Childhood Song)

Uncut Poetry

Childhood is a town we have to leave. Home is a destination we have to leave and recreate again and again. Memories are the wealth we carry as reflux. And we create ourselves as our own saviours as we search strange lands.

Even as we flee our abandoned bicycles in empty playgrounds, even as we carry hurt as big as childhood’s sandpit, even as we tell ourselves that leaving is the best thing to do, we feel bereft. What is it about childhood that we carry it inside us wherever we go, however far we might go? We carry it often as benediction, often as an abomination. If we are lucky, it’s the sunshine of those years which light up our later years, if all our growing is done in shadows, what we have inside is a throbbing hurting night.

What do we make of ourselves because of those years when we were open and ready to receive and vulnerable? What is it that we take forward and what is that that we desperately want to leave behind? What is it that we wish was different, what is that we feel should be changed but now can’t? Is there an unwarranted guilt? Is there an anger, a sense of being cheated, a feeling that someone didn’t do their given duty, of giving something as elemental as caresses of breeze and drops of sun?

Because only too often, we live only in the continent of regret, bereft of the balming buffets of past winds, and stigmatise our entire lives to the memory of what can never be changed. Only when we quietly let go of what we have accumulated throughout our lives and find possibilities to remake ourselves in some form of a sunshine, can we come out as full individuals, tempered, touched but not scalded.

We would finally find a new home.

If you liked this poem, consider listening to these other poems on the love, longing and loss of childhood -

• When I Hear The Whistle of a Passing Train
• My Little Zen Warrior
• Kripa (a blessing from a daughter)

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The following music was used for this media project:
Music: Heaven's Gate by Frank Schroeter
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10651-heavens-gate
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license