Goat Boy

The goat boy grows old:
under the burning sun he worked,
under the moon he worked,
he vanished in days of changeless labouring.
His bones begin to crack,
he cannot fall on mountains anymore,
roll down to the bright stream,
laugh, shake the bright hair of the sun
out of his green eyes.
Life is perfect in the lair of wolves.
The smell of bird-dung,
the taste of bread from the fireplace,
the sweetness of water in a red jar,
the hours that spin into splendid years.
Small additions blessed him,
mangoes plucked from the abundant tree.
The goggled-eyed scarecrow he feared
never claimed him:
he was fortunate in the time of tears.

Dream Heron

The glory, the shining, the certainty, the silence,
the marvelous peace, the gleam of water-glade.
Age grips me but I feel young again,
such beauty is the spur to live forever.
The great white bird tugs itself to heaven,
it seems to step upwards in the morning air.
In my memory it lives, my eyes are clear
as when I was a boy all the days before me,
time still in the shadow of green trees,
flowers pouring from the freshened earth,
a froth of colours, a cauldron rush of brightness,
that white ascension! Life intact and new,
not vulnerable to summonings from an empty season.

— Ian McDonald

Blue Song

In the drawing room, she surfaces:
hands folded on her lap; hair oiled,
pulled into a rubber band.

Now you are presentable,
her mother had said before sending her off.
A present? Able to be present? 

she wonders, fidgeting in her seat.
Her grandmother’s scowl stays fixed on her
the afternoon. Knitting needles click, keeping time

with the clock’s tick-tick-tick.
The sun sifts through jalousies.
Dust motes drift on shafts of light.

In the garden, her father remains,
plucking chords and notes,
and it is him she listens for

above the room’s din, not music
but the sound of his fingers,
insistent on frets, twanging on strings,

the sound that will become this room,
her father, memory itself,
an ever present blue song.


The Fall
for my sisters, again

In childhood, the world was ours for losing:
a ball we threw above our heads, watched
suspended in mid-air the moment before descent.

At night, the dark seemed long and deep.
From our bedroom window, we peered up at a sky
pricked by stars that offered little light.

By day, we wandered the grounds of our home,
recording but not understanding lessons
the world around us revealed:

rock and stone are different words
which mean the same when flung;
that beauty delivers its own kind of wound.

Now I see where we went wrong,
but who was to say then what was true
and what was the world we had to invent.

As we lowered each other over the window’s sill,
if we could have held fast to the rope
we’d gathered at our waists, who’s to say

we couldn’t have defied gravity’s pull?


— Shara McCallum