Leaving The Woods

I grew up in a tiny village in the North East of Scotland. There wasn’t a lot of people living there and only a handful of kids the same age as my brother and me. About a mile from the village lived some friends of ours and behind their house was an area of woodland which we used to spend hours exploring.

It was filled with rabbits, deer, foxes, a wee burn patrolled by kingfishers and an impressive waterfall hidden in the deepest part of the woods.

We spent our formative years in those woods before we all moved away to uni, or our parents moved elsewhere etc. You grow up, get older and move on.

The last thing I remember doing in the woods was spending a night camping with some friends. We brought a box of beer and a bottle of tequila then spent the night getting absolutely leathered and talking nonsense. Early in the morning most of us shuffled back to our pits, leaving our friend who lived in the house by the woods asleep in the tent.

He was supposed to have a job interview that day, but we were woken by a phone call from his mum later that day asking where he was. Turns out he was still asleep in the tent by the river.

This poem is born of some of the memories of those woods and a sense of leaving your childhood behind.