In Twilight

In twilight all perspectives change.

Trees seem taller, bulkier;
Hunchback beasts
Ready to stalk the night.

And the clouds, mere water-carriers by day,
Project the dreams and nightmares of the sleeping earth in
Curdled shadows on the curving dome of night.

I had forgotten quite
How small I am.

Darkness rises like a tide,
Welling from the shadowed depths beneath the trees and
Running out to lap around my heels

I had forgotten how it feels
To be so out of place.
And alien beneath
A rising moon.

There was once a first time,
A first awareness of the world
Outside my constructs,
A world where I didn't really matter.
May there never be a last time.

Only in alienation is a
Sense of self maintained.
Only in being utterly irrelevant to others
Is the strangeness of ownership of self brought home.


(c) A Mc N

Borderzone

(c) A Mc N - groynes on the coast near Stone Point on the Solent.

Day of summer rain

I walked in a wood
Lush with summer; dripping with rain.

The ceiling was a printed pattern
Of leafy fingers and palms,
Shining dull green in the dull gray light.
The wind shook wet mischief from the trees as we walked beneath their shade.

The song of a damp wind's breath,
The slap of leaves
And the rattle of rain
Was symphony enough for me.

I wanted to run with the rain against my face and to cartwheel
In the long wet grass,
But the adult in me said
It wasn't sensible.

But, playful still, I grabbed a narrow trunk of birch
To shake a shower from it's reservoir of rain
And run away before it landed.

The woodland paths were shining,
Filmed with a lovely skin of light.

It was a day of summer rain.
Even the ghosts of childhood
Grew green
and strong.

(c) A McN

The way trees dream.

I listened to the wind of a summer storm leaning on the trees outside my window.

It was late at night but my head was ticking louder than my heart
so I was awake,
taking in sounds
while the gentle simmer of thought
bubbled away with just enough
pressure to keep the lid off sleep.

The big trees bend.
The air sifts through;
leaking between the lacery of
leaf and branch.

The trees sigh,
leaves rattling as the wind exhales,
then a clumsy gust
tumbling out the darkness,
reinflates the canopy.

There is poetry in the motion,
lullaby in the songs of the air;
rhythms in the resonance
of tuning-fork branches
spilling their harmonies
to the liquid night.

Air twists and turns,
Spinning together from mountains and moorlands,
skimming on rivers,
and skating on oceans,
bundling through cities…
threading these woods
with the weave of their travels.

I hover on the edge of sleep,
Listening to the suck and surge of air;
savouring the scents of
a thousand mingled journeys
as they shuffle and spin
Through the shuttle of branches.

Consciousness seeps slowly away.
The wind gushes wild stories
In the gaps between leaves
and I fall asleep wondering
if this is the way trees dream.

(c) A McN