Blinded by the light:

And if you were on a walk,

the path beneath not just gravel

but a road of possibility,

and if the harvest sun, bloated,

the heaviness of being requiring it

to sit low – as if the horizon was a bench

for the larger things to rest upon,

and, playful to the mood of approaching dusk,

the grass dresses itself

in orange tinsel, or sometimes pink

so the shepherds and the sheep can cavort

in the knowledge the following day

would still dawn regardless of the night,

and the evening birds, in flittering browns and blacks,

sing the insects back and so bring 

the buzzing shells of childhood out to play

and the trees have started to morph

into their true guardian state;

and if the dark, with sharpened hand and feet nails,

creeps all the while at the edges

of the mind, allows the real world

to expose itself into the rigid frame

of the photographs we make believe

is all that there is;

and if words ring upon the air,

carry more within them than the mere

weight of sound;

as if stone might be opened,

as if water can be divined forth

with or without the forked branch,

with or without the dowser's knowledge,

as if the mind might be an antennae capable of recalling

all the knowledge lost;

and the stars could be sung down as manna

to flit upon the stretched-out tongues

of open mouths so long closed

that the words that need to be freed have been

kept hidden in the dark,

like lost animals, to dwindle into normality;

and in this moment, as if we hovered

at the edge — the brink 

of what we call life

and what is life — capable of the fall

into free space, undefined by the thoughts

or books

or rules we adhere to ourself

like names to keep us steady and in the entitled places;

and if when the bridles of unseen horses jingle

and the mounds suddenly have doors

and each and every flower,

before they close up shop for the night,

emits a single note of joy

and if you could

at this moment step into a ring of stones

would you return to us

or remain

in that unseen land that sits beside

this one?

And if you remained,

what then of life, would it be stretched out

or remain the same, different but on the same loom so that though the turning is different

to you, in that place, it seemed the same;

and if you returned, would we be here,

or would time become different between you and those you left

so that forever the gulf would remain,

you ringed in those stones no matter how many times you returned

and we

outside, lost

and thinking you had gone from us — eternally dead?

And if this happened would all the dead,

and all the travellers of those different rounds,

crowd round to see our faces,

to hear our cries,

to taste the tears on eyes

that can never quite see?