LORDS OF THE DANCE

During the autumn of 2015 I completed a quartet of poems under the working title, Murchen, which is the Gaelic word for Hare, a creature that I find fascinating, both in the many myths that surround it and in its graceful reality.
All four of the Murchen poems were written so that they may be read individually or collectively as segments of a quartet.
The one below is the third quadrant and seems to me to strike a suitably optimistic note on which to begin this New Year.

NOW

They awake,
past erased, future
nonexistent.

The world begins afresh.

Only the extraordinary
now,
a collision of senses,
exists.

Music.

Blackbird’s flute,
grasshopper’s fiddle,
drumbeat scuttle of field-mice,
accordion-wind in high meadows.

Silence.

In crystalline pools
trout glide like ghosts.

Owls, tombed in dead trees,
imitate death.

Dreamlike,
in the magical moment,

hares dance.