Going Back

Does it have to be real, to see:
those faces and poses long gone
into memory of bone,

disintegrating in the pregnant
earth with words as echo, with
laughter and tears,

the silence of a stare into knowledge
still clinging to the fragile
ivory yellowing and in-lived -

can I not imagine the colour
and spectacle, and make it real?
Would a glimpse from a fly

on the wall not disappoint, or,
worse, horrify beyond endurance,
the mind-cave never to be

scrubbed clean - can these
after-years of ancestral memory
not carry, like a wavelength

the real echo of colour, of rounded
flesh, of the moment, movement,
collective consciousness shares

the shard, the fragment of royal
blue and blood-crimson
waters of all our lives washing

into silence and time: we only stare
forward as we walk, the new vista
ours in the lived day alone and

unshared - beyond us is the life of
another - protected, in-wound, true to
their own destiny engraved on steel

that endures despite us that we
cannot see, cannot feel: that King,
that Queen, historical linen and

purple royal steps echoing to walls
that cannot speak their names.
In my time I have stared

at a screen and wanted to get
beyond it, go in, but I only
know the touch of my own waters

join with my own time, share
the speech of another that I will
carry locked in my own bone

towards the dawn I will never see:
I can only be me despite them
and know my own fears -

but the screen might not lie
and, perhaps, for a second
it can touch truth, recreate the

window whole and new
that those who come after
can glimpse us through.

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