ON A WING AND A PRAYER

Once, when in Brussels, I visited the Musee des Beaux-Arts and saw Pieter Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a truly impressive painting by one of my favourite Old Masters.  

The Icarus story is one we can all relate to: a tale of a young man whose ambition overrode his judgement.
Which of us has not, at one time or another, aimed impossibly high and consequently been brought crashing to earth when reality shone its fearsome rays on our ludicrous aspirations.  

ICARUS

I am falling from high
but they do not notice.

The air, through wings 
that promised much,
keens like a mourner.

Creeping ants below
evolve 
to shepherd, ploughman, angler.

I fall unseen. 

Someone
will dream it later.

I have no time
to scream.

The water is 
hard as stone.

SPINNING WHEELS

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.

A TIME TO DANCE

It’s disquieting when a child discovers that its parents have identities other than those of Mother and Father and that the stranger hidden within the familiar shape has his or her own fears and yearnings, dreams and doubts. 

HIS MOTHER DANCES

Crouched on the stairs, he sees her dance:

her feet glide over lino squares,

the wireless playing sweet and low.

She waltzes, as though in a trance,

alone, amidst pans, table, chairs, 

white kitchen sink: her eyes aglow.

Those slender arms grasp empty air:

her partner is invisible.

She circles, sweeps and murmurs words,

song lyrics or a lover’s prayer.

What seems to him incredible

is how the music, like small birds,

whirls round his sleepy, tousled head

and makes him sad. The dancing stops.

His mother, hungry for romance,

settles for washing plates instead;

talks to herself, while he eavesdrops.

His father never liked to dance.

THE SEARCHER

Looking back, I had a sometimes vexed relationship with my father as sons often do, I suppose. 
He was, in many ways, an introverted man, largely because of his hearing loss, and one of the strongest images that I have of him, from my childhood, is of a stern figure bent over the family Bible, silent and pensive, completely oblivious of his surroundings.  

THE FISHERMAN

My father, 
grey as a heron, thin
as a wafer, 
the Good Book spread before him 
like a silver pool
would sit for hours
unmoving, silently still,
his bald head bowed, 
one finger poised
as though to spear a mystery.

Oh my dear father,
what beguiled you there? 
What held you 
rapt
while, slowly, slowly, 
ticked the clock?

What strange fish lay, 
unmoving, deep
within those well-thumbed pages?