Class 326

Class 327

Rediscovered In the desert you forget What it’s like to be wet. But in UK come November You will remember. Rain rediscovered - A great, complex word, Of many parts and arts. Think and link: Re: concerning, or again; Dis: prefix for opposite, like dain/disdain; (I know that’s obtuse, A word no longer in use); Cover: smother, hide, defend; Ed: suffix, past, gone, the end. A season smothers the last, Yet our future is carved from the past; From each now the next is discovered - No, rather, evolved, renewed, rediscovered.

Rediscovered Easter Day 2020. Only go outside for food, do not touch the dog’s mercury. If you have a temperature cover your mouth and nose with wild garlic. From your window count wood anemones of Monks Walk. The graveyard grows dense with it, yet do not confuse it with wood sorrel whose head will bow each night. Rediscover bedstraw, ladies, by the Black Bridge. Lie there and pray to yellow archangel and jack-by-the-hedge to throw off the rattle of the white deadnettle. Stitchwort the front door, block the letter box with flowering gorse, listen to the chimes of townhall clock, to the news from moschatel, red campion, sweet cicely. Find and find again the wildflowers of Mill Walk Wood.

REDISCOVERED. Divorced seer renovated found it. A crossword clue and crosswords are the word lover’s delight, anagramming, punning, breaking down into constituent parts, stretching meaning and etymology. Rediscovered: from the French to uncover again; four syllables, or is it five? In older English the final two letters could be pronounced and that might be done by the poet, too. Take the word to bits and find its original meaning and then, perhaps, apply it in new ways as language lives and evolves. That is apt, since when we uncover something we had forgotten or, maybe, either neglected or deliberately set aside, what is rediscovered has evolved, too, as time modifies everything, even in the minutest amount. A most stunning rediscovery was the mathematician Andrew Wiles’ solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994, after the solution had remained hidden for three hundred and fifty years. The change was in the theorem’s importance to modern mathematics. How pertinent rediscovery is today as we break out of pandemic seclusion. Face to face again but everything changed. Grandchildren grown, paths over grown. Friends the same yet different through age and experience, and a world that has altered. All rediscovered but all new.

Rediscovered I stare through a hole I’ve made in the wall, where my curiosity at the hollow sound my fist made got the better of me. I see a step, and with my torch, three more, before they turn and head downwards. The smell is dank and mysterious. I cut the hole bigger and squeeze through. The stone sucks away my warmth. I proceed, clutching my torch like a crucifix. I emerge into a low cellar, taking comfort in my light. I feel my heart race as I notice a ring of stones upon the floor. I kneel at the stones and shine my torch into the black core. A well? This, after all, had been a weavers cottage, 300 years ago. The hungry darkness swallows my light. It is deep. I drop in a coin. Water! As my curiosity soars, the beam of my torch reveals something caught between the stones, about a metre down. I reach over, almost too far, stretching to get hold of it, fingers brushing. Then I have it. I bring it up into the light. An old leather child’s shoe, hardened with age. A breeze from the depths caresses my face. The darkness deepens.