”Sometimes our words are like our gardens and sat navs, they take strange routes/roots!”
A few weeks ago a student suggested this to me and it’s such a beautifully evocative idea that it has stayed on in my mind. So let’s have a quick look at the idea when it is applied to a poem in the AQA Anthology.
Here is the second stanza from Brendon Gallacher by Jackie Kay.
He would hold my hand and take me by the river
where we’d talk all about his family being poor.
He’d get his mum out of Glasgow when he got older.
A wee holiday some place nice. Some place far.
I’d tell my mum about my Brendon GallacherLook at the poetic simplicity of the first line of this stanza; it suggests tenderness and escape. It connotes connection and yearning; a desire to be understood in the privacy of some special , liberating place/ space.
Al Green’s song comes to mind too. Soulful dreaming of another life or another way to navigate being human and young and hopeful…
I think it is the leap from the simplicity of the held hand to the abstract expansiveness of ‘take me to the river’ which gives this stanza its intimate ‘route and root.’ We are rooted to the safety of the held hand and then feel safe enough to take the leap to what the ‘river’with its flow and mysterious direction might connote.
The rest of the stanza appears a displacement of all the young speaker might secretly desire to achieve.She speaks through the safety of the river and the held hand and of course through the persona of Brendon Gallacher.
Maybe this is what we all desire in friendships: to feel ‘rooted’ and safe and to feel we have a ‘route’ to follow so we are not lost but found?
A beautiful, very understated poem
