Just Sitting

The afternoon an empty box, stretching
and scrumptious, dangling freedoms.

Jettison that doer, the haver-to-be
on time, here, there, as expected
is the whisper of it.

The green grass here needs
no tending, each blade exercises
its very own right to life, liberty.

And this box might grow with every
un-ticked second until light fades
and sharply reveals that childhood treat
when space simply shrinks
and time lasts forever.

Digging Up the Light

I dug down then (after reading your letter)
through layers of mud and nose-tugging
earthiness and the crumble of clay
dry further down, dug
till I found the small round thing
that when broken open shone
eerily, steadily and in the end
calming (like your last sentence,
when a measure of sanity
surfaced, word by effortful word)
even if it proved the smallest ever
light to the world dug from the bowels
of our clag-muddy common mother
(never mentioned on any page)
and held up with a laugh, high,
like an infant sun already too hot
to cup in my crusted hands
(or to travel in a letter, to scorch you,
as you do me?) but at last liberated
even as it cooled, idling through time,
becoming stone, only stone,
keeping past, present
and future safe in its heart,
dropped, gently, and left,
covered again, lightly. A thing
that maybe never shone
out there.

Never Heard of Them

They have rivers there, names to them.
Let that sink in.
Rivers that cut through green, idle
through brown and red and sand colour proper.
Rivers that will have cleft
and diverged, flooded, presumably. Maybe gone
underground, there, where the crease is –
re-emerged over here. Changed their
names, the other ones you’ve never heard of.
Look at this warren of lines, the curious jumble
of letters beneath my finger: the whole
country an unknown barely named
in your mind.
Their towns an unsung bustle, peopled
by folding ghosts, the sort an imaginative
sci-fi writer might conjure. No evident
history, politics, televised news, GDP.
But clearly rivers there:
the crunch of pebbles,
the plop of fish.
Let that sink in.

The nearness
of farness of sameness
of pain. The no-difference
of any. The global fish
swimming in our shared
water of fear.