{"id":430,"date":"2011-11-03T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-03T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=430"},"modified":"2011-11-03T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-11-03T12:00:00","slug":"william-bedfords-angel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/william-bedfords-angel\/","title":{"rendered":"William Bedford's Angel"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Angel with the Rucksack<\/span>

I used to believe in angels<\/span>
the way we were taught to believe,<\/span>
but my angel with a rucksack<\/span>
seemed to arrive from nowhere,<\/span>
like plates flying across a kitchen,<\/span>
children learning to talk,<\/span>
I had never met anything quite like her.<\/span>

\u2018Are you going to New York?\u2019<\/span>
she asked in the dusking rain,<\/span>
and her wings were transluscent,<\/span>
her eyes wider than the grand canyon,<\/span>
leaving me nowhere to hide,<\/span>
no time for saying \u2018No way,\u2019<\/span>
before she hopped in and took me away.<\/span>

I believe Frank Lloyd Wright<\/span>
experienced something similar,<\/span>
in fact all artists experience something similar<\/span>
if they have the authentic gift,<\/span>
the grit and the grind of putting it together<\/span>
leaving everybody else behind.<\/span>
But how do you leave an angel behind?<\/span>

\u2018Take me to New York,\u2019 she said,<\/span>
\u2018and I will show you new horizons<\/span>
that haven\u2019t even been invented.\u2019<\/span>
So we drove to Manhattan,<\/span>
and rented a loft in Greenwich Village,<\/span>
and I smoked hash with Jack Kerouac<\/span>
and Allen Ginsberg chanted mantras<\/span>

and my angel with a rucksack<\/span>
sat on her prayer mat in a corner<\/span>
like a Chinese sage before the Revolution,<\/span>
saying \u2018I believe there are moons,<\/span>
I believe there are many moons,<\/span>
but none of them have a daughter,<\/span>
none of them nurture herds of reindeer.\u2019<\/span>

You would imagine I\u2019d be happy<\/span>
after such a holyday vision.<\/span>
You would imagine any kind of traveller<\/span>
would be happy to pick up an angel.<\/span>
But I cannot find the address <\/span>
of the cold water loft in Greenwich Village,<\/span>
and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg<\/span>

deny any knowledge of my visit,<\/span>
they say I am just another tourist<\/span>
trying to find glamour off their fame,<\/span>
inventing crazy stories about an angel<\/span>
hitching lifts with complete strangers,<\/span>
an angel who never revealed her name,<\/span>
and refused absolutely to open her rucksack.<\/span>



*William Bedford<\/a><\/span> is a poet, short-story writer and children\u2019s novelist, his work appearing in magazines around the world. His novel <\/span>Happiland<\/span> was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and he has received Arts Council and Society of Authors awards for his poetry and fiction. <\/span>



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The Angel with the RucksackI used to believe in angelsthe way we were taught to believe,but my angel with a rucksackseemed to arrive from nowhere,like plates flying across a kitchen,children learning to talk,I had never met anything quite like her.\u2018Are you going to New York?\u2019she asked in the dusking rain,and her wings were transluscent,her eyes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}