The first time I traveled there, a lengthy journey
all the way from Hawai‘i, I was already
an old man, had long ago quit believing I could fly,
felt I’d lost the mana of imaginative soaring
that had led me long ago everywhere I couldn’t go,
those worlds known to the young and young at heart.
Still, old as I was, my vision blurred by realities
life loads so easily upon us, it was a kind of torture, the waiting,
this waiting that had in fact been a lifetime,
because I’d heard of her ever since
I could remember, my mother often
referring to her when she would weave her tales
so much of the magic of my childhood.
Now I was here, at the dock, on a ship filled
with curious tourists, most of them my age or older,
and I sensed that all of them had approached hope,
wondered if we would be the lucky ones to sight her,
all of us believing for the time being, seated here
while the other sudden dreamers came aboard,
here on the most famous Loch in the world,
the deepest freshwater lake in the UK by volume,
the perfect place for a mythical monster to hide,
here for a time I began to believe again, and I was ready,
accompanied by the high spirits of my mother and these other pilgrims,
to see this beautiful creature break the water’s surface,
buoyed by the rekindled imagination of all our collective youths.
Lanning Lee 