Michael W. Thomas
On a chair in the corner of a summer house
a toy rabbit lolls on the brim of a top hat.
Magic has bulked its muffler, stands irresolute
at the door. On a scrap of paper,
someone wrote a place where it would
find welcome, but a gust of wind
skimmed it over the parish’s crown.
The day beyond the summer house
doesn’t know what its light is for.
It stares at its dumbness
like some kid who might almost
ask a girl to dance.
On the summer house roof,
a linnet watches its echo go begging
at the forward edge of dark.
But shake the picture. Magic recovers
the scrap, happens on a village
made of mornings. At the kerb,
an old man hangs from his memories:
a seaside pier rushes the length
of all his breaths. In a ring on the green
sit kids with the dew still on their pulses.
Behind them burn the effigies
of all that would have snaffled their hearts.
Even their teacher, a little apart,
waits to hear that A is for Zebra.
Magic obliges – jokers in spate,
an astrolabe threading stars and wishes,
a dove perched on the spike of sunrise…
lastly, a world spun from the very first hope
to be voiced, where every house
sings summer, where no bird’s cry
goes lost on the mudways to dawn.
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