Summersong

I can smell bonfires. Barbecues are being flung together, and all across the country the last of the summer is being greedily and hastily drunk.
I'm sitting on the doorstep, door open behind me, open sky before me. If I were to start a children's story now, it would start here. With a wish on a fallen leaf and magic in the floating leaves of the willow. How fortunate to have lived in a world of stories, of creations like JM Barrie's Peter Pan, Beatrix Potter's Jemima Puddleduck, disbelieving Alice in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, Richmal Crompton's William... Growing up and older is made so much easier for the spirit of imagination instilled all that time ago. Seems so very long ago when books were Books, and not 'children's books'.

Sometimes when I write a poem, it seems so very simple, so very now, that I wonder why I write it at all. I think how easy this moment is, how clear - surely I will be here forever. Why write the words when I am living the poem? But then something moves, restless beside me. A shadow, a reminder. In just over a week I will be re-admitted into hospital for a week long course of IV ImmunoGlobulins.

This has become the noble savage of diseases. It has become polite. We meet, we acknowledge each other, and then at times, I am left alone - to breathe life into old dreams, to conjure new ones.

I am writing myself into freedom.