Images from Childhood
The memory quickly fades into origin: days of sunlit, ashen mornings, and the golden –
bouncing off the copperware, the field of green, chiseling away the edges, the teeth-like irregularities,
and softening June with the colour of setting suns. Surrendering to the shape of birds at twilight,
and us – little figurines, hands a mess of bones, Bodies tumbling towards another fate.
This was back when we couldn’t separate the glow from the sun, the fire from the spectacle –
younger versions of the same self, stuck in a heaven of their own making.
And the solitary image, stuck like a riddle in my head: you, running towards and running away,
And your little hand – a fist around mine,
Tight and tangible and dreamy,
like an aftermath of some great frenzy. And the house, still surviving, breathing with wind,
existing not as some painting or a photograph, but a structure, a monument, that lived on
even when the sunsets, and the birds and us - all had stood up and left.