The sun was setting, and we were in an open-topped jeep. Horribly lost in the Paphos Forest in Cyprus with no road signs or way markers, and before smartphones were invented.
I was afraid. And my panic grew with each mile along narrow, unmarked roads, hairpin bends and precipitous edges.
…
We clearly found our way out because I’m writing this today. Yet it was a visceral experience whose echoes I still feel in my body when I think about it.
So at this time of moving forward into the unknown, I was delighted to discover that the Poetry Unbound podcast with Pádraig Ó Tuama is back and starts this series with the David Wagoner poem Lost
Here is the opening of the poem as a taster for you to listen to the whole episode:
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
+ from David Wagoner’s poem, Lost, in Collected Poems, 1956-1976