Puddles on a tandem

I felt you come alive when the wind streamed in your face
and when I tempted you with puddles something lit you like a bulb.

Three times we split the water,
sliced the mud to peals of laughter.
The shadows that had haunted you that day
fluttered ragged in the wind until they fell
dissolving in the wrinkled waters
underneath the pedals
as we passed.

I had forgotten quite how beautiful
the simple things of life
can be.

(c) A McN

It was her first time on a tandem but unlikely to be her last.

Ornithology in Prater Park

For a heartbeat,
eighty feet above Vienna
the long arc of the swing pauses long enough to tease
then tip us backwards upside down
to face the tiny people far below.

We plummet like a gannet to the ground
but like a swallow skim the earth
and like a lark ascend the air again;

something in us singing as we go.

(c) A McN

I never normally go near a fairground, never mind a fairground ride. It was life affirming in a funny kind of way - feeling so vulnerable at the top of the scary swing.

St Stephens House by touch.

At St Stephen's house
we felt the carvings on the walls.
Skulls grinned as we poked our fingers in their eyes.

The model (with its cold brass geometries of scale)
showed us how small and insignificant we were - as if we didn't know.

But then we stumbled
on a pattern in the rock
upon a block
of limestone in the wall.
We felt the sharp and shelly sand
with semi- rounded pebbles
from the ancient storm and flood
that rolled them into place.
We felt the smoother grains above
that told of later long
and windless weeks and water
smooth as glass.

Through several hundred million years
this memory in rock remained to
teach us how the little things
endure beyond our wildest dreams.

(c) A McN

No-one had interpreted rock strata to him before. It was a Eureka moment when he realised his fingers were touching a weather event from millions of years ago - a tactile photograph of time.