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Friday 5 April 2013

To my Children. May Day 2014

 

A point of life between my parents dust
and yours, my precious children, that is I.
A bearer of the ills which bear I must
We breathe together briefly; soon I fly.

I've seen you come to being, one by one,
In labour wards of nurse and sometimes stay,
Like prismatic colours from the rising sun
Willing you to live another day.

New feathers, dropped from angel's wings,
Satellites, around your mother's sun,
Begot from the wisdom that with fear begins
The unimaginable wheel of time is spun.

Labour's storm that has found a nest
when wisdom stands aside for nature's force,
I tell myself you're better than the rest,
No father ever spawned a Trojan horse.

Love transferred by lips that form the kisses
to eyelids shutting out the the unseen face,
Repeated, thousand times on nights as this is,
You had no say in choosing time or place.

You know me well now; don't know me at all!
Can only gauge myself when I'm asleep
You have no probe to measure rise or fall
or tell if I'm a shallow well or deep.

I never did enough for you or can,
Can't even guess what you expect of me,
Sometimes a furtive glance or curious scan,
If only I could see what you can see.

The Reaper has no diary, makes no date,
Life and death, each the other cause,
There is no antidote to fate,
Flesh will perish, to prove it never was.

A convicted prisoner in my grated cell
I am, awaiting truth, grim arbiter of all,
The moon, the waiting and the tremulous bell
still penetrate this finite wall.

Departing sunbeams cannot last,
Hearken the ferryman, one way ticket from land,
And what my judgment when I'm past?
A safe or slip from your father's hand?








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