by Richard MacWilliam
In the cool chill of a morning
Dew-lapped, birch bark curling proud and the scent of autumn,
I whistled my name to the still sky
Quite certain
Of fields full sleeping,
Black tears wept,
In rabbit-paw copses dreaming by the old pond
As the sun drew blood
And my feet
Turned and drifted me in a calling.
Then I had a brother,
Moulded in the songs of infancy, full of delight,
And my spark touched fire and burnt his face
And we shrieked
To our mother’s song
In a bundling of frenzy
And ran for the dark oak by the barbed wire fence
To scrabble and duck
In our youth
Into the summered joy of the hunt
Running with the airy limbs
Of children playing castles in the green of the woods
And the wild sunshine smiles of the chased,
Past hazel,
Shadow of hawthorn,
The horse-mushroom patch and tree
Where the high pigeon stood its calls on the air
And there was I free
Of myself,
And in myself most freely given
In the emptiness of our understanding,
And troubled not the trees nor the world
With our weight
Of unseeing years :
And the morning was unspoken,
Unbroken, kissed by unseen hands controlling this,
The new-born moments
Together
Tumbled into childhood’s fractured bliss
Until we found a stony track,
Drifted slow, with switches flicking, broke the hollow back
Of time, dawdled on a mystery,
Spun out purpose,
Stretched our living rhyme
And walked towards our destiny:
And there, beneath the worn bones standing guard on fear
Where time had told
We began,
Beating out our song in morning’s light
As we strode like giants
Into the captured land our slung sticks framed,
Gathering silences for inspection,
Dissection,
Long-lost reflection
In the loneliness of quiet
Carved from the sun-buzzed nested briars our tired limbs made:
Until, at long last worn,
We were done:
Had called for the day, and won the morn.
Sharing more whimsical poetry with you one day at a time.
Shannon
