© Photo by Jon GodfreyMillennium Dreams
Another quiet dusk ushers in the year's demise,
colour seeping from the fields to a grey wash
and then dark wings over like a hard slam
as creatures of the night choreograph
by street and headlight, candle and flame.
Lights angled off eaves leave pods of safety
and shadows flicker like a magic lantern.
Sucked in the earth's rotational pull
somewhere a baby wakes and cries,
an old man turns over in his sleep,
dreams of his mother, and softly dies.
A family gather round their TV screen for mass
while, from another age light years away,
a star quietly implodes leaving a blip on a
monitoring screen.
The night driver focuses on a straight white line of road,
voyeur of the dark, bat in his cave,
he passes the night-lights of insomniacs and revellers
and other glow-worms of the gloom,
past the window of the writer who,
feeling under some dark curse,
vigils the night to haemorrhage her life in verse,
and the home of a woman who, safe in her head,
stretches and uncurls her life in dreams,
folds up her wings and walks towards the hills,
and ovulates her first-born son
who will have his mother's eyes
without the worry in them.
Soft air cushions like night breath,
tangy with a breeze of stale sweat and death.
His car is like a nest, too warm, voices echoing in,
made small by technology, speaking
of meals and plans in that outside world.
The ghosts sit in the back of his cab sometimes,
conjured up by the smell of shallots and a migrant worker,
his grandmother clicking her false teeth,
speaking in broken English,
sending a prickle of hair along his spine.
Guardian of the night, he watches a young girl
safe to her door. His radio cackles,
an electric storm seems close and he wonders
about all the silent traffic, the radio waves
and ethernet exchanges, the private cacophony of dreams,
rising mutely into space.
From a star pin-cushioned black night sky
the moon, holy in a misty veil, gleams down,
inscrutable, casting a wide mantle across the sea,
and he watches for lights from the French shore
and dreams of a bridge where he can drive
straight off the island and onto the French mainland
and drive and drive on.
When the new year births buds will peep out of pots
tensile for the light and birds begin a jubilant wake,
insensitive to other's pain; now a moment of daylight and no people,
he follows a waddle of ducks along the valley, patiently,
caught in an adrenaline surge of hope, nicotine edged,
eyes gritty, floating a tide of Nina Simone on the air.
Home towards bed, the night's magic starting to fade,
safe and protected in his tiredness,
he floats ethereal, caught between the night and day.
© Jacqueline Mézec