Deep Roots

Poetry Pivotal 2

These hesitations, advances,
doublings back & crossings out,
snakes-and-ladders, scrapings
at opaque prisms of light

a Tolkien ordeal of
winding precipices and milky depths
that takes me to the realisation
I am clinging to a secret

that leads and holds me back –
it’s the reason the horizon’s tilting
all ways, and why the poem
is suspended in a tunnel of jet

until its scraps and stages
gather into one shape and make
a faint beam for the next few steps,
a yellow circle for the white page,

the beginning of a re-enacting
in the arc of a new shedder of light
more positive than torch or match,
a strong light mirrored, sun

in a distant morning, reaching here.
My fighting black characters straddle
the bridge; lying back on a ledge
I drink the safe shadow and go on.


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