when time sucks them back
inevitably to that long ago future point
we do not want to remember
Grahaeme Barrasford Young
Returnings
The moon rose dark tonight. It is time to go back,
to the beginnings, the old ways, the old gods.
Your light has begun to blind me.
I lost myself for a lifetime
in its electric brightness, its ecstatic neon glance,
but now I know that all it was
was that I could not see to see.
The moon still has a daughter, even across the ocean,
and though her light is dimmed
by the passing of your glory
her darkness is generous and all embracing.
It will welcome me again.
Do not underestimate my grief. I mourn your loss,
the absence of your brightness, the light in the blue
teaching me the beauty of drowning,
but it is time to drown out of my own depth,
in the black moon-dragged waters of my own kind.
My history is trying to get back to me.
I gave you my dull past
and you illuminated possibilities
that spun the world one hundred and eighty degrees,
revealing coloured paths we ran down
skin in soul and others more gently tinted
for walking through together, though we never did.
Habit still places my feet on your bright yellow road.
I am not yet ready for the wilderness of this next rotation,
the circling of the eagle over the corpse of the bear.
I am not a nomad, a dreamer of hopeless dreams.
If I hold my hope in empty hands, I do so knowingly
to display my loss. I will not blame you
for what you cannot do.
Old imperatives ache darkly along my bones.
The eagle and the bear will never dance together
