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in collection, The Sorcerer’s Arc, 2004, Hearing Eye
Sestina It doesn’t matter how you tell the story, as long as you remember how it starts: the sun must fizzle out in darkened skies and furtive shadows creep across the lawn. Of course there is a churchyard and a ghost, and usually a child who’s lost his way.
A frightened child who always asks the way, and finds himself mixed up in someone’s story – something about a churchyard and a ghost who makes his presence felt in fits and starts before his furtive walk across the lawn to leave his shadowed outline on the skies.
Next day beneath the ever-blue of skies the tale is seen in quite a different way: cucumber sandwiches on the well cut lawn are more in keeping with a shared love story, one that finishes where tender kisses start and no-one stops to think they’ve seen a ghost
until the heroine disturbs the ghost, whose phantom fingers creep across the skies and rushes back to where the story starts to try and make it end a different way. The problem is you have to start the story where furtive shadows creep across the lawn
and once those shadows creep across the lawn it’s almost certain that you’ll see the ghost and set the wheels in motion for a story where sunlight fizzles out in darkened skies. There doesn’t seem to be another way the end is anchored where the story starts –
the curtains rise, the cast appears: it starts as scary shadows slant the haunted lawn – the child who’s lost won’t go a different way, he’ll stumble in, alone afraid. The ghost will rise, disturb the sun and blacken skies, he’s present now, and always, it’s his story
and like all stories, it must end. And start – it’s happening now – the troubled sky, the lawn, the ghost await the child who’s lost his way ...
June English
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e-mail poetry p f in relation to June
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"Counting the Spots",
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