Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
From The Song of Wandering Aengus
By William Butler Yeats
Happy the man who dreams his purpose
plots his course to achieve that very goal
marches to the beat of his own drum
and pity one forced to follow roads
laid down by parents’ aspirations
but I drifted into adulthood
with no pressure and no direction
and took many turns along the way
slowly grew into the man I am
Though I am old with wandering
Love life is the companion to work
the superficial couplings of youth
conducted with more vigour than sense
reaching the sunny uplands mid-life
settling into a career I thought
would last a lifetime, a love to match
but people carry pasts within them
like hidden rocks in a calm ocean
and accidents deflect one’s passage
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
To know another is a life’s work
the unity of coupledom is
illusion, we travel parallel
at best, learning the geography
of roads built across bogs of trauma
always ready to gently subside
and mire a person in buried past
and paths are hard to find in a slough
of despond and she has lost her way
I will find out where she has gone
Looking back at the path I followed
there is more coherence than I thought
skills grown and transferred in work and life
and love too, so much surer than in youth
and all the scars and breaks accreted
are the medals of experience
and trying not to look toward the end
but focus on the roadside flowers
the next generations we began
And kiss her lips and take her hands…
© Andrew Wilson, 2026
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in FormForAll, Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft, invites us to writa a Glosa, a Spanish poetry form in which four lines borrowed from a poem by another – the cabreza, are expanded upon over 4 ten-line stanzas… I chose lines from WB Yeats, who I have loved since studying him at school, and whose poems still resonate with me today. In 1995, I went to live in Sligo, Ireland, where Yeats is from, and is buried beneath nearby Ben Bulben mountain. I was a signwriter and painted a sign and mural of Yeats and his work, for The Winding Stair bookshop there – you can see me working on it in this news clip…
