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Sleep! For I even love the darkness around your sleep easy, innocent of regret
and while you sleep a globe lamp lights the dark with the world’s continents, antipodes
the joke-animals, all-the-world’s-children we read to you and you take them into your sleep with you.
Sleep? We only wish we could! Across the big brown hot-lands in dust-stormed shanty towns
the children scavenge or fall sleep in T-shirts, hand-me-downs with logos the same as your ones;
those children, shadow-children tiny, fly-blown doppelgängers are the dark stars of this world.
Sleepless, I love the darkness round your sleep. This world, seen from the moon at least, is a blue-jewelled Eden.
When one of them appears in slow time bringing a ceremonial tall column of swathed silk head crowned with matching silk knotted to an ancient rule to leave two silk wings of green-gold shimmer
I think of silk from the tamarind tree of another time when 400 camel-loads a year brought unwrought silk from Ghadamis to Kano.
They pass on like royal barges down a narrow stream. The complex floating strands weft-float patterns remnants of structures that crisscrossed deserts the great brocades, the small brocades.
We create a little space as they pass on as if this ordinary moment at the bus stop were a moment of investiture of these bearers of silk incognito.
Today I would have talked about amygdala, almond-shaped clusters of inter-connected structures perched above the brain stem -
but today was ominous: inner and outer weather mingled around the campus in a tide of cobalt clouds.
Amygdala, little almond, I would have told them it was you who runs these loops of low-grade melodrama —
but a gull was crying above the concrete temple of the Arts Block as if it had forgotten the sea.
I would have taken them through the limbic system and the ancestral environments of our feelings, explained the neural hi-jackings
but feared I might be mad myself, sing turmoil at them, sing the syrupy vernacular of the heart
and they’d be waiting faceless, rising tier on tier like placid saints, the dispassionate white screen waiting
to be scrawled with the graffiti of frets and angst, the pa system sense the drowning hollows of my voice and boom uncertainty.
Today our main concern…our main concern will be the cohorts of our intimate enemies, the toxic thoughts, the case of love…
September light is saturated with unvoiced thanks
someone must have thought a time of gifts still hovered in subsiding gold
for the drifted leaves that fill the church as if it were roofless,
bereft like us, have been put there; someone’s made an easy-viewing frieze
of easy things to love: autumn leaves and ornamental gourds
the greening- red hydrangea, darkest crimson of chrysanthemum
draped the pews with hops and very old man’s beard.
The photos in the vestry are scenes anyone would choose:
mist and frost in empty lanes the trees in all their moods
pale moony mornings before long days of absence
for nobody really lives here now or anywhere, we’re visitors to everything.
Yet it was an un-scrutinised affection for all things lost,
nothing conceptual, no cutting edge, the tender loving care
of all critique suspended for a time of gifts to glimmer
in elegiac September light.
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