John Deane's Badlands

The Badlands
 
It was a door opening wide onto the world
from the confined systems of our small concerns;
 
a place to dream, among soft and peaty acres,
easy to be secretive, as Nicodemus was,
 
slipping inside the house by night, seeking
understanding. To float on a world
 
brindled with heathers, water-lilies and the dream-coat
damselflies with their iridescent blue twig-bodies;
 
to find oneself stilled within the great consciousness,
 
hushing a while the leanings of the heart,
life radiant but disturbing, like the mind of Hopkins
 
in his days in Dublin. Human history here
is the dusk-light dawn-light miasma
 
of passing ghosts, where roots of the old forests
re-emerge from their deaths like bogland caravels;
 
there is the dream of erecting a bothy out of scraws
and whin-sticks, of listening to the whispered
 
music of the winds, one with the shriven earth.
 
   © John F Deane 2020