Dragonfly Sonnet

It is the cave of me, its emptiness,
Which hollows your own imperfections free.
The echo shapes a shadowed tenderness,
Where absence learns the art of memory.

Yet in the damp, where silence clings like stone,
A fragile nymph stirs restlessly unseen;
It dreams of wings it cannot call its own,
A shimmer waiting where the dark has been.

And so it breaks — the thin skin of the past,
Shedding the weight of oldness in the night;
The cave dissolves, its hold undone at last,
A body glimmers, born of hidden flight.

Innocent now, it hovers, fierce and small,
A dragonfly that knows no cave at all.

The original Poem

The Cave of Me

 
It’s the cave of me, its emptiness
That hollows your own imperfections free.
As if in the darkness of the internal soul
The streams of pure beauty flow like
Glistening rivulets procreant in unfathomed
Grottoes. 

The dragonfly was once
A grub in that darkness. We never
See his emergence. We see him skate and skim
And fly free, and have never seen the painful
Miracle of the shedding of oldness in darkness;
Thus, we were not given to that vision, the
Knowledge of which is too much to bear.
We were given to be like the dragonfly
Innocent and flying free.

 
Oxwich, Gower
October 1972

Dog Years – for Bertie

 Instead of scattering your ashes, let’s go

for another walk across those swaying

fields you’ll sprint half the length of, sun low

as I dawdle your lead, watch you weaving

free through waist high grasses, time blurring

as wind whittles away at limestone edge.

You’ll sniff your way through these fields, village blinking

distant like so much loose change, a hedge

gifting a perspective that the hardedge

look of things might resolve to melt away,

your single bark now echoing a pledge

to live, as dogs will, in this moment, this day.

So much for memory. Below this ancient shelf

You’re still running, still scattering yourself.

    

      Adapted from a poem by

      Ben Wilkinson