Thursday, 17. September 2009, 12:10:51
travel, life, Canada
Wednesday, 9. January 2008, 13:37:40
life, memory, poems, feelings
...
Geography Lesson
by Brian Patten
Our teacher told us one day he would leave the school
And sail across a warm blue sea
To places he had only known from maps,
And all his life had longed to be.
The house he lived in was narrow and gray
But in his mind's eye he could see
Sweet-scented jasmine clambering up the walls,
And green leaves burning on an orange tree.
He spoke of the lands he longed to visit,
Where it was never drab or cold.
And I couldn't understand why he never left,
And shook off our school's stranglehold.
Then half-way through his final term
he took ill and he never returned.
And he never got to that place on the map
Where the green leaves of the orange trees burned.
The maps were pulled down from the classroom wall;
His name was forgotten, it faded away.
But a lesson he never knew he taught
Is with me to this day.
I travel to where the green leaves burn,
To where the ocean's glass-clear and blue,
To all those places my teacher taught me to love -
But which he never knew. Today I read a poem that touches a nerve. Tears welled up in my eyes, just as when I was watching a documentary on Icelandic environmental refugees who emigrated to Canada at the turn of 20th century, just as when I saw the Bulgarian young man in the award-winning film
East-West (France-Russia-Spain-Bulgaria, 1999) swimming to freedom in the Stalin era.
I
travelled. I
struggled. It is not easy to fulfill one's dreams and go see places. It is not easy to be a new immigrant. Hardship abound on the road. Barriers to overcome before and after you leave. It takes a lot.
It is sad that the teacher in the poem never took off. I am glad I did.
Sunday, 19. August 2007, 07:52:47
memory, Norway, Sweden, music
...
I am crazy about this man right now. Well, enchanted by his music. His name is Edvard Grieg. The great Norwegian composer who composed such beautiful music as "To Spring", which makes my heart ache and my mind sentimental almost beyond control. I also like his "Erotic", but it is the gorgeous melody of "To Spring" that moves me most, invoking complex feelings and layers of memories.
I was once very close to Norway. I was in Stockholm. My travel companion of two days, a Japanese girl with very bad English with whom I shared a room in a hostel, was taking the ferry to Oslo. It was only a two-hour trip, I was told. I yearned to go with her, but she was from a free country with a much more powerful passport that requires no visa to travel in the western world. With my unrespected Chinese passport, it was already a miracle that I was allowed into Sweden - a personal triumph at the Swedish Embassy in London that would always make me proud. Luckily, after seeing her off, good things started to happen, as they always do when I travell alone.
But that is not what Edvard Grieg's music triggered today. Today, it invoked older memories. Events that took place in a broader context in the last years of the Cold War.
WIDGETIZE