Climbing towards the Light
There’s a ladder I have to climb,
that goes up like a white trellis
into the blue sky. The sun’s already up,
nothing is in front of me but this.
The white rungs quiver, steady up,
sway again – it all takes time.
Too high now to go back down
I take my time and rest holding
onto the supports of thick-weave rope,
telling myself it’s easier to cling
than let go, believing I can cope,
cut off over a sleeping town.
Trouble’s already starting there:
business begins as curtains stir,
the whole mechanism is a clock,
vast, faceless and sinister,
without face or hands or safety-lock
to stop it. It works on air
as I do, and it feeds like us
and feeds off us – easy to forget
it is after all just a machine
that goes down streets in dry or wet,
fitting into each morning scene,
quotidian as the morning bus.
I don’t climb to get away.
I quarry into the sunlight,
the unburst bubble of dust-seed air.
Sirens, planes, birds in incessant flight
will soon make nothing of my dare –
resting, I greet the swaying day.
