As little children do..

Under the desert moon

I walked the dry skeletal land

stumbling over black contorted

bones of rock.

Barren as a brickyard in the dark:

only ants and spiders moved across the clinkered ground.

In the torchlight spider eyes

reflected golden green.

A soft wind teased the tent,

the fabric skin breathed slowly out and in,

leaving secret whispers in the air.

Cicadas in the wadi sung

and on the very edge of hearing

distant waves were booming in the night.

And I am somewhere in the dark

above a nameless wadi

on an arid peninsula

in a foreign land.

No rhyme or reason to it all,

just the deep, deep draw of solitude

that needs to be alone

to learn to wonder once again

as little children do.

(c) A McN 

Bridleway.

When I walked out on this bright spring morning,
I felt like a creature from another world where time had frozen round about me.

I knew the earth was singing like the birds,
But the note hung in the air,
A single tone anchored to the soil.

All around, the green buds burst,
Sap exploding into flower-froth;
hydraulic energies inflating leaves like detonating air bags..
But in the treacle motion of my freeze frame world
I saw only delicate flags of white and green,
Fingering the morning air.

And the sun hung golden
In a mist so thin that the hills were watercoloured by the light.

Everything was soft;
The light, the leaves, the motherly curves of the grass-furred chalk slipping down to the track where I walked.
Even my shadow was soft, draping itself across the dry path where ants moved in intricate perambulations;
clockwork creatures trickling out of cracks with their morning mechanisms slow and half unwound.

My spring unwound as well
and in the long, elastic string of time and circumstance
I tasted the unhurried privilege of peace.

It was a taste I could acquire.


(c) A Mc N