Oliver's Poem

You took me away for the day

I don’t think you know what this means:

The boyish charms, the tee-peed schemes.

Yet unpicked seams of a dress, I must confess, I chose to wear especially:

a cardinal sin to be unpresentable to another person’s parents.

Too wet for croquet, too sweet to go with what we ate: our conversational revelry

bashing at the conservative gate.

The reveille of the forces of morning could not come too late. For me.

So please, disregard the things I said: to misconstrue a pew for bed?

I got to watch the tree-trunks, slip into paper-crowns,

as the golden vault struck shy and bowed down to its deep brother.

A pierced, imposing lover for the earth, a dark drama here unfolding for our mirth.

But we’re not even watching, even the scenery was resting:

Somewhere a myriad of fields of cut-out trees and cardboard cattle,

lent waiting and unseen, propped-up by an endless ceiling.

The rooms spoke bravely of parents that had laced and stitched long lives upon the walls,

threaded private moments to the brick,

to let visitors walk in soul encrusted crooked halls.

Its as if rosy-fingered dawn, through the windows, had dug her finger-tips in tight,

and laid down her dreaming through the house,

coloured ink to paper,

a vibrant home to rest her might.

You said without a word: not everything is so extreme

that tears the sky , gives cause to dream –

there is poetry in subtlety.

The tiny pin-strokes of a hand that’s kind, a forgotten flutter of a young boy’s cry:

This corner a broken knee? This one to check their height?

That is the only wealth that I could ever envy: a history not written down, or closely leather

bound, but organic in its flight.

So if war is done, why not try this peace: that drooling melt where words do cease?

Helped by the high spirits of spirits, and the jolly bottoms of bottles -

Here by your fire I’ll teach myself to be quiet; the rushing mind, that ashen rain, will drip

as butter back into my life.