Broken Shadow

Night time in woodland.
The soft whisper of summer
Swallowed by rain.

Leaves’ resistance holds back the drops
And the tired grass tries to sleep
Beneath the moonrisen clouds.
Wet, reflective birches rise
Over the huddled stones’ moss.

Leached of colour,
Half-remembered light reaches down
Like time stilled before it can pass,
In the dim early hours,
Rain receding.

Every leaf shivers, weeps a little;
Each drop’s long arc to earth,
Is a wet sadness.

The balled moon, bright against heaven
Reveals herself, pale,
From wisps of the last clouds’ going.

Scattered through branches, her light
Is divided in flickering shadows
At the trees’ feet and, moving,
Sparks like metal on the blades,
Throws back a share of moonshine.

In windless silence, water echoes.
A far stream sounds in the hollow of a stone.
The last of the rain gathered, falls at random
To the ground.

Was it memory alone
That brought us here,
You or I?

Imagined in a downstairs winter room,
Figures on a landscape
Walked the least distance into mist,
Haloed and insignificant,
As if the futures we are now in
Were already there.

How could I have thought,
The distance to here was so great?

I had that dream in some stranger’s bed
Stretched out like the dead,
Barely born, laid waste
In the turning of a worn-out year.

I was too young for prophesy
Too raw to feel the landscape glisten,
Even in the fevered dream,
Like something I should have known
As I walked in the staggering night,
As I fell from graces and unintended heights,
Unwittingly, from your embrace.

Unintended. Mistaken.
The rebound of destiny, like a ball,
Carried away the days and nights
And all our conversations.

Daylight, fading intoxication, like love,
Or its chemical equivalent,
And a failure of sustenance
Brought the dream to nothing.

Later, in this stand of febrile trees,
With my mind too old for recollection,
Memory insists this grey and weary night
Is like the dreamed one
As if the premonition came to be.

It bears no truth, but still,
The dripping woods,
The colourless faint-lit forest floor
Reminds me of it.

No point at all to this:
What is gone is gone
And we are old or already dead.
The skins we dressed up in
Too tight and tangled
Faces lined by time’s passage
Unrecognisable now.

I no longer know you,
Would not know you if your face
Were in the woodland glade
Where tonight’s moon shines.
Its light as ghostly as the other moon
Half a century gone.

Rain, now fallen, is yesterday’s water.
What is left is dream,
Another dream, running from sky to soil
From memory to earth.
What I remember was a frozen moment
When those, so many of them dead,
Were quick and mysterious.

Like the rain on a leaf,
Its moment sliding into long descent,
Another moment in momentous history
Brought us together, sent us apart:
Separate destinies.

It is as it is.
Like the drenched trees
In the forests’ clearing
There is nothing but dream.
Moonlight is all there is
Imagined and grey
Time so pressing
In the end stands still
In the light, forever.

Who were we
If not the rain itself?
Separate random pieces
Of a storm we never knew,
Never even heard.

 © BH 2014

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Been out in the woods a lot. Which is nice… And it's New Year again. I recall a moment as a youth being exhausted (as a newt) and having a vivid dream on a sofa in a place that should remain nameless. A lot of water has gone seaward since. People I met that new year have shuffled off now, others I've not seen or heard of for near-on half a century.

Then I think about rain in the trees and I get that feverish moment again. Is that how premonition works? Something reminds you of an instant when you thought 'this ought to remind me of itself later…' 

I doubt it. But still…