Walkway

The sudden green of the walkway

tumbles up in reaching leaves

and autumn flashes amidst the dark shades:

but splashed across the pavement

damp litter is speckled and spattered.

Old plastic Satan has fled this way

shedding scales of dirt and dollops

of body-filth, damp with bad breath,

and the soil is flecked with dead

and discarded plastic; white hues

of promised purity; and streaked

with the yellows, reds and blues

of the old wrappings of idle shoppers.

Litter sleeps filthily upon the earth,

breeding.

And schoolchildren amble by,

hands in pockets, beanies pulled   

low against the wintering sky,

walking the path between

the living green

and profane carelessness,

the long path of the shadow

of death.

 - Brian Walter 

She Dreams

The soul comes to consciousness in a great

cavern of space; a column

at her back, knobbed and ridged, all the way up.

Horizontal ledges left and right, like scaffolding, leading up.

Above, to left and right, two dim tunnels

leading off. And below her, two more, moving downwards.

And she is sitting here, in this cool silence, and looks to see

what she is. Naked and little.

A foundling in a cave,

back up against the column, looking up, and around.

She’s agile enough to scramble everywhere-along the jointed tunnels,

in all four directions, to their very endings, even,

where her world ends. She learns

how to wriggle into even these terminal places,

where she can feel something of everything that is beyond her;

touch some of its movings, ponder its messages.

The frail light she wanders in must come from somewhere above;

so up the scaffolding. Then this vertical shaft,

this stem, into a smooth gourd, a round hollow,

gleaming like the inside of a pearl.

And with windows!

Warm stuff, full of light, flooding in, which sets her

quivering like a tuning fork-

and her world shivers into being, too.

 - John van Wyngaard