Children Paddling


Burn water gushes.
Sun warms children's skin
as they swim in the shallows.
I watch from the sides of the gulley

while their lives run through my fingers like water.
I cannot hold a single day
and say it is mine to keep.
Deft limbs flicker

like light on the cavern wall;
lives not like the ripple
that keeps its clear curve
day after day in the current

but leaves turning in the flow
as they fall from the sun.
We inhabit damp surface of granite
mid solid and space

that meet as stone presses on air and air on stone.
The dense hill gestured upwards long ago,
invaginating the light
but knows in its core its kinship

with the dead centre under living skin,
the locked black vault of the planet.
Rabbits burrow down into its hard heart,
unearth ribs in their mound

that I know as human,
broken teeth that bit once pale knuckles:
the bones of the dead rising from pagan turf,
anguishing again in the sliver mid slab and storm,

on the carapace of a great creature grown green with time.
The Earth carries its cargo of grief around a glaring sun.
The river passes its silver over and over the granite
that does not stir to any caress.

This river and this wind
cannot coax a word from the stone
with its soulless centre.
The water trickles down into the dead earth

to insinuate in cold sand and gravel if it could
some vestige of torrential flight.
The children paddle in the shallows
and their lives run through my fingers like water.

A stone tossed sinks to its home
and water splashes in an arc of light.



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Colin