Creation Radio
There was a time when I took my radio
into the night wood and tuned its pyracantha
needle along the dial through noise jungles
to silent darkness at the waveband’s end.
First there was nothing, or at least my ears
couldn’t hear it, just the sea-shore non-stillness
of rushing static, but as the hours passed, that
phased out and in its place came something between
voices singing, a whispering, and the sound
of flowing like the sap inside me as my veins
streamed blood, pulsing, a low throb and beat behind
bark , and from deep under leaf mould and roots,
and all around, the slow breathing of sleeping
creatures, the soft stillness of curled voles and birds.
It went on through the night, growing’s ‘live’ broadcast,
and then sang to itself beyond first light under
morning’s first songs in the stirring of branches,
but by then my small radio’s batteries
were too weak to pick it up, the daytime
stations too brutal and the sunshine too loud.
While it lasted though there was something in what
I heard that I was sure I knew but couldn’t
remember, something that had always been there,
although much fainter now, more distant.
In the darkness at the end of the dial
beyond babel, an ancient music seeded
from forest loam, and I understood then
and always after, that once the song stopped,
while it would be always unforgettable,
it would be forever unrecoverable.
Seán Street’s most recent collection is Running Out of Time (Shoestring Press, March 2024). Prose includes works on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets, and several studies of sound poetics, the latest being Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong, published in July 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic. He is emeritus professor at Bournemouth University and now lives in Liverpool.