And yet even here there are the stirrings of new life. The first seeds are there to be separated and nurtured, and led on their long path to perfection.
Out walking today in my old sandals and cloak, with a straw hat to keep off the sun, stumbling about talking to myself in the muddy waste towards the river, I was stopped in my tracks by a little puff of scarlet amongst the wild corn.
Scarlet!
It is the first colour I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the colour, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight.
Poppy. The magic of saying the word made my skin prickle, the saying almost a greater miracle than the seeing. I was drunk with joy. I danced. I shouted. Imagine the astonishment of my friends at Rome to see our cynical metropolitan poet, who barely knows a flower or a tree, dancing about in broken sandals on the earth, which is baked hard and cracked in some places, and in others puddled with foul-smelling mud — to see him dancing and singing to himself in celebration of this bloom.
Poppy, scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind. Scarlet. Magic word on the tongue to flash again on the eye. Scarlet. And with it all the other colours come flooding back, as magic syllables, and the earth explodes with them, they flash about me. I am making the spring. With yellow of the ox-eye daisy of our weedy olive groves, with blue of cornflower, orange of marigold, purple of foxglove, even the pinks and cyclamens of my mother's garden that I have forgotten all these years. They come back... though there was, in fact, just a single poppy, a few blown petals of a tissue fineness and brightness, round the crown of seeds.
Where had it come from? I searched and searched but could find no other. The seeds must have blown in and taken root. But from where? From the sea — carried high up in a stream of luminous dust and let fall among us. Or in the entrails of some bird on its way north, and growing out of the bird's casual droppings as it passed.
I sit on the ground and observe it. I love this poppy. I shall watch over it.
Suddenly my head is full of flowers of all kinds. They sprout out of the earth in deep fields and roll away in my skull. I have only to name the flowers, without even knowing what they look like, the colour, the shape, the number of petals, and they burst into bud, they click open, they spread their fragrance in my mind, opening out of the secret syllables as I place them like seeds upon my tongue and give them breath. I shall make whole gardens like this. I am Flora. I am Persephone. I have the trick of it now. All it needs is belief.
And this, as I might have guessed, is how it is done. We give the gods a name and they quicken in us, they rise in their glory and power and majesty out of minds, they move forth to act in the world beyond, changing us and it. So it is that the beings we are in the process of becoming will be drawn out of us. Beginning, as always, with what is simple.
Poppy, you have saved me, you have recovered the earth for me. I know how to work the spring.
It is about to begin. All my life till now has been wasted. I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life.
And yet the words were already written. I wrote them years ago, and only now discover what they meant, what message they had for me: 'You will be separated from yourself and yet be alive.'
Now I too must be transformed.
— David Malouf, An Imaginary Life