The ever after

In this place where love once lived
a dried up festered dream remains.
Golden rust of autumnal woods,
meandering paths of possibilities
waiting for us to walk down them
with love songs on our lips;
Now lost are the ways, harsh and tangled.

Loving once only to watch it die
not in a glorious poetic moment
but putrefy, with age and resentment
in a cheap terraced house of no note,
magnolia, with unfinished edges.

There is a child.
His pure hymnal laughter
shatters the mortuary air.
Another child grows
oblivious in my warm tomb;
astounding that cadaver like
I can grow a perfect life.

That mother was a patchwork quilt,
threadbare patches screaming apart,
she never held it all together.
And then this mother
cracking face and bleeding eyes
barren goddess to a child.

Can a child grow without dreams?

(July 2013)

The other reality

Night brings on other realities
of a languid woman of lusty hues,
spreading her limbs apart in desire,
and him. Dark eyes and dark hair
beautiful and clear and burning.
He could desire me, admire me,
snake his arms around my waist
kiss my neck to envious eyes.
He could, and I would let him,
now, when my limbs are liquid,
my man and my child locked
away in another reality.
I could even let this woman look
into his dark eyes and fall.
But I know, through my stupor,
that if she were to look over his shoulder,
the dreamy mist would give way
to ugly black dying shapes.
Why should this lust fuelled night vision
have anything more than the inglorious end
of the other reality of day?

(From early 2011)

Night Terrors

3 AM. Another night spent awake and alone, shaking in the memory of my child screaming and pushing me away, recoiling from me. Health Visitor  says this is Night Terrors. What has he seen that has blighted his tender mind so? Thought of Sylvia Plath's poem 'Child' and borrowed heavily from it.

Child,
you scream in fear and recoil from me.
Have I unguarded let you look
into my infinite churning despair?
Did I fail to silence an anguished wail?

Once we imagined meandering tales
in bedtime shadows and warm yellow lights,
we flew with dragons of faraway magic
and soared with the moon on the wing of a giggle.

Am I now the ceiling without stars
That haunts your clear eye?