Tuesday 9 May 2017

Dream Upon a Village Childhood

<Audio>

A patina of grime on the vanes of mind,
yawing with the wind of villagers out of sight,
shaded and turned around corners of the past.
Whispered the siren call, come find
the invisible ghosts crying in the night,
of that bloody last-supper howl,

why?

   do I return somnambulant?
My skeletal being leaping from the top,
of the top, of a day way back,
when the blood oozed perambulant,
annealing in the fire of a sunset crop,
or a diamond-dusted coal sack,

burning

   in the emptiness of a whiplash sear,
as I turn to say to ... to ...
But they were here! They are here! Hiding
in the eye of the seldom seer.
Sapped heroic as the tricycle boys who,
spitting on their bleeding knees, go sliding

grassed

   forever flashing in their bejeweled tears,
shrieking in the devil may care
of a shimmering summer’s day.
It was as if a galaxy of light years
had rimed our bumper-boots where
running wild sent the marsh marigold spray

flying

  back onto the window seat's last bus,
where beside every mother's warm hand
the night flows by, and all the imagined
boy's own darkest thoughts, must
press heavy on the eyelids of time's grand
design, to sleep down upon the marriage

of

   a child's glad confident morning,
golden on the haywains,
and the vertiginous edge teetering,
at the crumbling of the days.

May this poem be my pillow,
as I lay down my final dream.


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