I watch my Leo charges with matrilineal pride

their lion-cub suns clustered

round the skirts of my ruling Pluto

- 2° each side a’piece:

 their terrible other mother  I do not doubt

but also champion, guardian she.

 

The little one, milk-teeth still in place

spins in  the Leo-moon rising shadows

as it lofts over the garden wall at dusk

lost in her own magic, moonlit world

- all lions and mythic creatures -

so all I can see are her skimpy limbs

flaying like gawky, ghosty windmills in the gloaming

her voice babbling non-stop

so she takes to hopping at break-neck speed

lop-sided like a drunken sailing craft, racing round and round

nattering to herself like an old crone

not to disturb her,  crouching over her inexplicable silences.

Anyway, she is fey, Aquarian moonling

elfin green fingered and, this evening, double lion

lacking its audience - precocious arts aside -

becoming creator of its own golden mystery

for its own self, in its own right.

 

While her brother, the bothered

for once the  ‘I’ forgotten

lies on his stomach on the floor

absorbed with paper and glue

pasting tea leaves and lentils with rapt attention

his nimble earth fingers, always ingenious

finding satisfactory expression for kingly needs

in the grace of line, texture, appearance.

Sadly, I can suppose

this will be duly quashed, belittled  as rubbishy inessentials

 Go, do more home-work!

- the most essential thing of all.

 

I feel small and humble before the buoyancy

the faith of life itself

- that, given even the outsidest chance

against the unfairest odds

with the grottiest of tools

the crumbiest of mentors

the stingiest of sterile environments

and totally unaesthetic conditionings

still, if left to itself, it can heal and make whole;

While we for ever bump into our own futilities, our ignorance

- the more known, the more is not -

unable to resolve, recreate

Unless….unless be thou as a child.

 

March 1989