Revelation
at Pontins EASTER SUNDAY 2002
I
thought I was hurt in my pride only,
Forgetting
that,
When you
plunge your hand in freezing water,
You feel
A bangle
of ice round your wrist
Before
the whole hand goes numb
Norman
Maccaig ‘Sounds of the Day’
The
past? It’s a frozen, foreign land.
A labyrinth
of tourmaline-a dream
of black
horses flowing out to sea.
Breaking
the chains of memory
that tie
us to the static of the land
The
past? It is a strange and twisted
tongue.
I cannot
bend these chords to utter it!
Cannot find
a rhythm in the rime.
While fools
found gold in crystal streams,
I rooted, ankle deep in mud, braying:
Who are you?
Why are you
here?
The
past? That coldly calculated joke.
Those
idiots fell about the place side-splitted,
While I
looked for help,
for
meaning,
for a sign.
Not that I
didn’t understand.
But that I
would never understand.
Because...
I seemed to
be a stranger there.
Something
foreign.
I didn’t
know the refugee was me!
The
past? It is shapeless, blind, a mute
place.
No road
maps or strangers passing with news.
The very
idea seems cruel! This loss.
And is it
not cruel, this vile thing
set loose
around the houses? This abuse
of
heart-skewering fear.
The
nightsounds were lonely in the vale.
The clouds
mere smoke-rings of obliterated joy.
Oh these
losings of familiar things!
These
losings of familiar things.
These tales
of the three rings.
And the
first...shall be: Who knows?
I did not
realise the refugee was me.