Nicole Page-Smith
The leaves fall through our mind and we are rooted to the spot, drifting though in memory as leaves blow through trees and rustle in the wind, storms of lightening and gods of old. Leaves scatter on the ground and it is Autumn.
Leaves are crisp underfoot and you walk through the Autumn leaves, they blow. Blowing leaves swirl all around and are as though extensions of your thinking blowing, blow through you as though through a forest. Forest leaves, blow and Creaking, bows answer. You are wandering through your mind to the other side.
In the forest of imaginings leaves grow and leaves grow out of branches. The branches extend, upwards, outwards and are as ancient as the trees. Species of trees feel they have been there for thousands of years, propagating; there were seven, hills of Rome.
Walking the forest in the history books but not experienced felt only the emotion not the place and then, you go there. Preconceived ideas, ideals and your mind travels elsewhere to far off places, only for the gods, seldom do visitors trespass and are not noticed for the temples worth. Long since gods seldom worshipped for the same purpose, a religion not practiced. Gods live there for trees to grow through ruins, columns litter the earth and once, we were temples for former gods gone by. Wooded knowledge of trees once fallen and leaves blow on by in the wind.
Favoured books and then, you found Bernini as though by accident and there were tours all the while, churchyard and service. We walked as though forests were all around us but were never there in the low, lying place. Oh, the river Tiber.
Walking along where angels were angelic at birth, we cross the river. Saint Cecilia and Bernini are churchyard monuments on one side of the river while Moses and museums take us to the enormous tribute to Bernini, a tribute to Hellenistic sculpture, making you jealous. Lived lives, people have been and not gone, linger. Halls and halls of sculptures, Romans being Roman, the leaves crumble underfoot like leaves of a book, old with yellowing parchment and pages well learned. Manuscript libraries of manuscripts and sculpture in practice, physical, weighty monuments, a tribute to the Roman Empire, walking, we walk with the angels and the history books.
Sitting, quietly, I enter my forest of imaginings and wonder.
Leaves crumple, underfoot.
Autumn is upon us. You wonder where the cats go all winter. You sit in a cafe having coffee and sweet cakes. Modern art and modernism have equal masculine weight with melted plastic, tributes to Vulcan and bronze sculpture, collect your bags and wander home. Oh, the pathways and the Christian missionaries, the martyrs and Popes, gone by. Rome in Autumn. Leaves falling like the memories, befalling.
