Blinded by the light: (edit 1)

worked through this one.

Blinded by the light:

And if you were on a walk,
the path beneath not just gravel,
each stone a seperate thing,
hard-edged, unable to forgive,
but a road paved,
joined seamlessly with possibility;
and if the harvest sun, stomach swollen, 
the heaviness of creation requiring it
to sit low, knees akimbo – as if the horizon were a bench
for the larger entities to rest upon, – 
and if, playful to the mood of approaching dusk,
the grass dances while dressing 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 husks of childhood out to play
and the trees, so silent for so long, 
return to their whispers as they 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 in 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 if the stars could be sung down as manna
to drift down and land 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 ourselves
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
and slowed down or remain the same, distinct 
but on an identical loom 
so that though the turning is different
to you, in that place, it seemed time 
moved at a comparable rate?

And if you returned, would we be here,
or would time become a contrast 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?