As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

by Laurie Lee

High sulky summer sucked me towards it, and I offered no resistance at all.

I lay on my belly, the warm earth against me, and forgot the cold dew and the wolves of the night. I felt it was for this I had come; to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.

It was a way of life evolved like a honey-comb and buried away from the burning sky;

I wanted the excitement of doubt, the satisfaction of mortality, the freedom to make love here and now on earth.

talking ceaselessly together with the dry throaty rattle of pebbles being rolled down a gulley.

first took up arms. Under the pale street lamps, amid the weeping and curses, the simple truth was being uncovered. After the day’s massacre at Altofaro, and the clumsy impotence of the warships – whose shells appeared to have fallen harmlessly in open country – it was being learned again that men needed more than courage, anger, slogans, convictions, or even a just cause when they went to war.

I saw again, as I lost them, the great gold plains, the arid and mystical distances, where the sun rose up like a butcher each morning and left curtains of blood each night.