LIFE CYCLE

While living in Italy some years ago, I watched a young man cycling in our village with a child strapped into a seat behind him. It brought to mind excursions with my daughter when I was young and we lived just outside Edinburgh. Constantly impoverished, I travelled about on an old junk-shop bicycle with my tiny daughter perched precariously behind me in a rickety seat that wobbled alarmingly when we went over bumps. Ah, the recklessness of youth!

 























 
CYCLE

The living world sails by, complete:
strange images engulf her; sounds
pour into her; she is caressed
by air, safe in the old bike seat
behind her father, the firm mounds
of his buttocks against her chest.

A young child, perched like a nestling,
in the metal-framed basket-seat:
his firstborn.  A small miracle,
the proud father thinks his offspring,
and to him, in the noisy street,
she clings, tight as a barnacle.

He pedals hard, pursued by time:
like roulette wheels, the bike-wheels whirl.
A breeze, around her soft hair, sings
with lyrical, unreasoned rhyme.
Euphoria engulfs the girl:
her arms reach out like stubby wings.