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I am trying
To put this Nowhere place together,
Writing in a silent room,
Dusty with mystery.
My pen scrapes at the page
Like a mad phoenix
Trying to find a way out
Downwards,
Trapped inside a maze of words,
Searching for a lost Utopia,
An undiscovered country
Where everything fashions itself
According
To its own true secrets.
Yesterday I saw the Minotaur.
What does it do in the wild wood?
Who can know where the labyrinths go?
Brothers fight in there,
Testing their rivalries,
Frozen to crystal shapes of what they were.
Today I found a letter from Zeus; my father.
It came through the mirror the other way,
Like a white hole takes a black hole back,
To claim its space.
A fight for power, my father says.
There will always be war.
The earth swallows us daily,
Heaves us up and spits us out.
It speaks through leaves and rock,
Proclaiming itself with laughter.
Mischief.
Only that.
No more.
But it tries the nerves.
I write quickly.
The story is losing its memory.
An old man's here;
The ghost of a son my mother had
That will not go,
A shape that does not move,
Or even murmur
The water will not let him be.
It wants its men,
Creating them
Over and over,
Bringing them back with the tide.
When the land erupts,
The people take refuge in truth,
Attempting to reinvent themselves
In real time. Not mythology.
It is all too slow for history,
Harsh as the first sun, given
To much display of vengeance.
I am the child of Zeus and Hades
Who cut their worlds apart,
Leaving them lost and heartless.
I draw the maps,
Working from water
That moves
Fast as the last breath.
There is no future,
I cannot think a fact that fits.
The school of birth forgets,
Crammed where the sky no longer
Balances in the right place.
© Wendy Bardsley 2014