Dreamer
The castle’s ghosts are all aglow
A haunting brighter than before
A fevered corpse-light lit to show
We few who venture through its door
How once a bloody warrior strode
Through halls bedecked with battle gear
And here a servant bore his load
While there a prisoner watched in fear
And heard in every clink of key
Each echoed step, each muttered phrase
The dreaded end to misery
The closure of his lightless days.
The castle’s ghosts are in a trance
In stately waltz spin slowly round
Condemned to dance their endless dance
Since ancient time on ancient ground.
What puppeteer could hope to match
This theatre of unquiet sleep?
What portrait painter dared to catch
Such trembling souls from out the deep?
The murdered child, the tortured priest
The dungeon masters and their slaves
A world of Darkness here released
To Light more cruel than their graves.
The castle’s walls and lawns have known
Since long dead masons raised its towers
That colder things than clay have grown
Beneath its crypts, below its bowers.
When moat was lake and barrow hill
They troubled not the ones who lie
In timeless slumber, dreaming still
Of moon when freshly cast in sky.
But humankind in grief and rage
With sprinkled blood and echoed screams
Has brutally closed that silent age
And now our pain infects their dreams.
The castle’s ghosts are parts we glimpse
Of drama in a nightmared mind
A mind so vast its night-time imps
Are shared with all, by light defined.
And with that knowledge we bold few
In whom mere spectres struck no fear
Make haste to see the stars anew
From somewhere safely far from here.
For as the moon grows pale with dawn
And glassless windows watch day break
We wonder with what hungry yawn
That long-vexed dreamer will awake.
Garden of Remembrance
A dim green garden walled around with shade
Deep-carpeted with moss
With only muted birdsong to invade
The silence draped across
Its ivied trees.
Part-roofed by these
I make the room in which to hoard my loss.
No carven stone to catch, no urn to hold
The eye for relics questing
And leaves, not statues, serve here to unfold
Wings mournful, never resting.
That ruffling breeze
Through ivied trees
The only hint of where the ghosts are nesting.
What loss, what ghosts give sense to such a setting?
The ghosts of might-have-been!
A life not for remembering, nor forgetting
Which haunts the in-between
A blurry frieze
Like ivied trees
Whose true shapes are suggested, never seen.
I used to hope to find a slim young sapling
To make that garden grow
But longer shadows on the moss are dappling
And I prepare to go.
Goodbye, old trees
You hid the keys
To more of life than I shall ever know.
Joy
The place beside the stream where you and I once went to
play
Is overgrown with weeds. The weeds and earth cannot recall
The sun and sand and smiles that made a certain summer day
A time in which contentment found its apex and its all.
We too are overgrown, and age has silted up the mind
Our blood runs slow and childhood’s bliss is buried far
behind.
The morning with the book in which you taught me how to read
Is overlaid with years. The years and cares have pressed it
flat
Its magic of discovery, a talent nurtured, freed
To make the world its oyster - but I never managed that.
We too are overladen, worries weight us till we crawl
Our heads hang low and childhood’s leaps collapse in
lifetime’s sprawl.
And so the shining moments dim and dwindle in the dark
An evanescent fountaining of brightness fading fast
A glimpse of reading in a room or walking in a park
Recalled and cherished, then let go, to die away at last.
But you, your smile, your voice, your love of fun are with
me still
And that is what made joy of all we did, and always will.
Assumption
Inspired by J K Potter’s photo-composition “Dark Angel” (1991)
Extruded from the dark rich earth of old Versailles
A satin-garbed enchantress pierces lowering sky
With hands at breast and shoulders back and head tipped high
A black Madonna, yearning yet serenely proud
Whose flexing feathers blur amidst the seething cloud.
And in the garden sculpted bushes steal her form
Awaiting only wings to let them lift and swarm
To merge their cloddish bodies with the coming storm
All matter mutely crying here for spirit’s flight
Suspended in the hush between the dark and light.
And that is all there is, a bleak but splendid all
A twilight rapture, incomplete, a demon call
Which summons creatures rooted fast yet reaching tall
Delighting and tormenting with the hope and fear
Of some transcendent state forever far yet near.
So this the very cusp of our aspiring art
Expressing what we can of that enchanted part:
The soul that springs from reaching mind and rooted heart
To print a doomed ambition on a doubtful sky
And make a dusky heaven out of old Versailles.
Bird Song
What do birds know of the silence that speckles their song?
Is there a meaning for them in the sunlight through leaves?
Instant by instant the glittering tapestry weaves
Where is the soul who can say where his stitches belong?
Order and chaos emerge from alternative views
Self into world is the magic we try to arrange
World into self is the counter-spell, making us strange
Who knows the dream-melted shape in which self and world
fuse?
Phlegm in the blood forms a shell that the noon heat leaves
cold
Hyperaesthesia may open the heart to the night
Which best to judge between foolish and wise, wrong and
right?
Damned if we do as we please, if we do as we’re told.
Life is too short and the ways of the world are too long
Truth is an eye-blink and doubt is a long, troubled sleep
What did God see in the darkness that covered the deep?
What do birds know of the silence that speckles their song?
Simon MacCulloch lives in London and is a regular contributor to Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader and Aphelion.
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