Seeps into grave goods, gold, a rusted spear.
Beware of dreams under the goose-flown snow.
Old blood weeps here, through grit into cold caves.
You are too young to know what sleeps here.
A child playing with a glass ball, laughter
Let fall in the clear flow, wren flitted,
Lost in the fragile wood, green shoots hid
From the glance of what came after.
Brushing her long hair’s swirling song,
Fishes darting between stones and roots.
Brambles, blackbirds, steal through the sleeping castle,
Waiting for a suitor’s silver moon to rise erelong.
Calls the cockerel, wolves surge under beeches stirring.
A mason’s granite broken wagon rumbles,
Wades the drowned dangers in the torrent’s force.
Changes the bright course of the journey’s flowering.
Plunged the churning pool, thundered, fell, entered, gasped.
A salmon’s desperate leap, foaming rocks caressed.
A feral cat’s surrender, fern-tongue nest,
Drank sweet rapture, dawn, knew the other clasped.
The dusk heron from the reeds has flown
The supplicant has left the temple and silence called
Bone-white timber ribs gape in the shallows
And silence answered from its stone.
Our broad merchant, master of barges, apples, barrels, generous at the inn;
Drifted among the crowd, a slow current through marsh grasses,
(A snake in the shallows disturbed the cattle drinking)
Is a servant of the season’s trades and figured books, watchful of the
warehouse grain.
Here at the mouth of a vast night,
Gulls scream and whales haunt the sea with their song
I can hear the booming of an ancient wake on the cliffs of a distant shore
The wind groans in the empty harbour, “Who has gone before,
Why am I left alone, what did I do wrong ?”
On the wall of the ruin a newt whispered the message
To a spider beaded with dew,
To owls in the mist,
To fairy vapours under the willow,
To people who walked wounded, slowing,
Leading a hooded horse
Towards the hills and drifting castles,
Burdened with secret words, they knew.
With the rain, release and we are become the air,
Medium to the drumbeat, dance and song.
A fox licks the water from its nose.
Screams at the taste of the old warrior there.
