Return to the Real

 

In your bed

amidst the turbulent sea of stray and disembodied thoughts

you lift your hand, and look at its palm

its present life

its story of times past, and to come

a book of uncut pages it seems.

 

You enter a real and present moment

where, gradually, things settle

ramblings become discernible strands

and strands disentangle

forms appearing, with boundaries

insides and outsides

like the drawings of the Rosary Vine you made.

 

And in the spaces between

an unfathomable love that embraces all things

born not from sweetness alone

but the sufferance of the sustained look.

 

How different are such words as these

yet, sharing the courage to reveal

they bring a return to the real.

 

From Tregonning Hill

 

'From Tregonning Hill she would be able

to see everything'

her daughter said, a year on,

while her granddaughter sat in the spring sunshine 

sewing a pouch from a scrap of brown corduroy 

and pink thread.

She paused and wondered if they were called

blanket stitches.

 

We took the lanes from Breage

through tunnels of fresh green foliage, 

shadows, wild garlic and bluebells,

up to Balwest, past the well planted Methodist Church 

and the table of plants for sale.

 

Then the footpath, first to the disused quarry 

where preachers summoned the miners of kaolin

and where her daughter heard The Lord's Prayer

whispering in the wind.

 

Up near the memorial her ashes were layed to rest,

in dark soil, by bilberries, gorse, and foxgloves,

and under rocks whose quartz embedded faces

shone, as she took in the view,

west toward Praa Sands, St Michael's Mount

and beyond the sweeping hills of Penwith

toward St Ives Bay.

 

On our way back, she sent message to a passer-by

to respond to her daughter's query about the name

of the white flower in the verge.

'Stitchwort' she said.