A lone walker. by Madeleine Gray

You learn many things taking routes away from home.
A backpack crammed with essentials, keeps my back straight.
My legs enjoy the balance made from good posture.
Decide to follow the stones, not the path, wind up
somewhere lost in the wild. British wilderness is not
as tame as one may think. Uncoil the trees,
cut through the bushes like a butchered heart,
still pumping blood, and rainwater - remember to take a moment.
Or many. Like how the ocean floor remains a mystery,
so does here. This pocket of land you keep under your feet,
is still yours, throbbing, pulsating, yearning to be touched.
You keep it alive. The woman passes you, breaks the colours.
She’s an interruption, and stands unnatural against the
shrubbery you have been conversing with. She lifts her head.
She lifts her heavy head. You wonder whether her voice
could exist in such silence, or would it sink and rust
like the bicycle which pokes through the river’s top,
endlessly gawping for air. The bicycle cries
as it thinks of its owner, walking over the tracks they made together.
I have begun to measure time by things that erode.
Caves and cliff-edges, riverbanks, my own fingernails.
Three days becomes three months. And so on. And so
Three hours is the same as infinity.
Popping blisters with safety pins, yet each step
had its purpose, metre after metre, comfort in
knowing the path can't get steeper, just narrower, but
however far I walk, or how many faces pass me by
I cannot forget how much
the bicycle cries.

Madeleine Gray is a Hertfordshire-based creative writing postgraduate from The University of Warwick, who has a keen interest in experimental writing. Through her poems and fiction, she explores themes of family, grief and mental health.