Summer

We are having our typical summer in the UK – a few days of sun followed by rain!

This is a poem I wrote a year or two ago.

*

She gazes at her illustration of traveller’s joy

for at least five minutes travelling back

sixty years to art college. There’s no one else in the garden

and she says the words aloud, traveller’s joy. Lips

and tongue curl around other summer arrivals;

willow warbler, orange-tailed bumble bee, swift

and swallow-tailed butterfly.

She’s sitting on a wicker seat, a first edition of her book

open on her lap. Leafs through pages

savouring other kindred names; shepherd’s purse,

roast beef plant, everlasting mountain and forget-me-not.

She stills her memories and walks along the gravel path

pinching bits of lavender to smell; her elderly cat follows-

too arthritic to chase butterflies, birds or bees.

A sunlit patch of lady’s bedstraw lies ahead;

her skirt brushes the yellow flowers, a faint smell

of autumn fills the air.

The Matrix Meets Midsummer Night’s Dream

Neo puts a hand to his head and touches his hair. This….this isn’t

real?

No, it is the mental projection…of your digital self. Lovers and

Madmen have such seething Brains, such shaping Phantasies, that

apprehend  More than cool Reason ever comprehends.

This_ is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end

of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive

simulation, that _we_ call the Matrix.  You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo.

This…is the world as it exists today. Are you sure that we are awake? 

It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.

What _is_ real? How do you _define_ real? If you’re

talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste

and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Tell them that I, Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the Weaver,

this will put them out of fear.

The earth, scorched . . .the desert of the real…We have only

bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain

is that some point in the early twenty-first century

all of mankind was united in celebration, and then apocalypse.

We marvelled at our own magnificence…. the poet’s eye turns dreams to shapes and gives

to airy nothing a local habitation and a Name. . .

A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race -then you will see, it is

not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

If we Shadows have offended

think but this, and all is mended: that you have slumbered here while these

Visions did appear and this weak and idle Theme, no more yielding but a Dream.