Seeking the pagan dream under bright skies

Not drawn from obsession with religion or ages past

Nor in cultures compared and dissected

But drawing a bead on harmony role and face

A quality of knowing yourself in your place.

About living within earth's clever design

For most of the time for most of our tenure

Where have we come what have we done

To a pastoral idyll in our celluloid dreams.

My salt breath cleanses

The scrying pool senses

A future is of pictures past

A time of dark

Pollution marked

Ambivalent light

Remarks our plight.

Mask our face it chokes our frames

All day and all the night our bodies bathed

In  the white noise of our changing times

Disassociated mourning invisible loss.

Yet once we laid our bodies close

In earthen posture thus reclined

Bound by sun's heat and cooling Luna flumes

We cried it out.

And sweated tears of blood

In soil

In toil

Embroiled we were in our pain and seasons gain.

Now our food is wrapped in plastic stretched

So safe so sterile no harm lurks there

Dreams bound in fire-warmed comfort

And hot washed in bliss tumbled and dry.

We seek to search to comprehend

Where trials and tribulations once lay

In our slumbers deep we still pursue

Lost times and lives under sky.

See regular twitch of arms and legs

In duvet's soft but firm confinement

Locked down in a dreamer's marathon.

Gentle containment of an ancient discontent.

Was it a more simple time

No probably not

Try not to bathe in nostalgia's warming inclusion

Live real in your present life.

For human nature did decide

To shape a world to our vision

Odourless laundered  clean and bright

So sneaky so slowly the effort makes pace.

Now: the weather’s a forecast of probable percent

Cold a photographic vista  snow clad majestic peaks

The mechanism of our revolution

Smooths our hands in labour’s absence

Soft and pink like a baby's.

And so we worship our plastics

Let’s  pile it high

For it drifts on the currents

See it floats in the sky

In a microscopic slight of hand.

It lives within all who inhabit the land

Not forgetting the deeps and Mt Everest's highs

In retina burnt deserts and moist warm jungles

Blowing happily across baked tropical beaches

It creeps and it seeps into creatures who eat

So we cry and we weep but do not yet do.

All must kiss the finger ring

In worship’s point of view

Let plastic be our epitaph

Writ large proofed shiny new

In love and legacy we pledge our troth.

Planet green and blue no longer true

Cling filmed and preserved in our image

Placed so gently into an oven of our creation

A present for you to enjoy in our future.

So now , I think, we must look back

To pagans of old

Where grip was lost

Proud fingers bruised and broken

In the bright light of progress

Where the dark skies

Turn to neon ever day.

Hollow ways once trod stay image clear

Revealed in esoteric slight of ritual’s tales

The arcane amber details the view

In today’s celebration real and substantial

A Santa Claus in a land of central heating.

So push aside your prejudiced inheritance

Listen to old knowledge out of mind

The terror  a process path and way 

Recover your voice, illuminate your day.

Your world your place a measure of grace

Dust down and take up connections forgotten

Out of time’s memory  round corner they wait

Their splendour poised a life  just for you.