Early Memories Poem by Tom Billsborough

Memory collects from every sense
which Words mould into experience
In the museum of our consciousness.
In the Beginning, was St John correct
To choose word as the dominating factor?
Or did the first explosion,
Breech the combustible silence.
Birth's trauma and its tsunami of light.
So making the instigator sight?
And yet we learn that in the womb
The sense of touch comes first,
Followed by the bonding union
Of child and mother.
But do we remember this in retrospect
As the first encounter with our senses?
Or is it a flower's scent
Which still illuminates an early incident
Or the insistent Mnemonics
Of music and of rhyme.
Which resonate through the cortex of our mind
Into the deepest caves of Time.
I have no visual memory before the age of two
The first I can recall was of a bonfire
In a street and sounds of joy and laughter.
I think it was VE day. I could be wrong.
Memory will change the substance
Of each incident or song.
So we come back to words,
We learned by the age of two,
So perhaps St John spoke true
At least as far as memory.