World View

There was darkness
and the darkness that there was
was on the face of everything.
And there was fire.
Cold fire, blue steel fire, semblance of fire,
semblance of light, fire without promise or threat.
And figures, shadows of figures,
semblance of figures figuring
hardly at all in a huddle, huddled
round flames lacking light.

And there was God. Tongue-tied and silent,
a murmurless mummer of a God, miming creation,
re-making in mime the old misbegotten conception
of his long ago. Invisible god - except for the hands,
the hands of a weaver. Intricate movements,
balletic with grace. Weavers of space
and spinners of time on the go.
And the eyes with the hands,
two halves of a coin spun as one.

Then visible darkness. Thin darkness hung
between me and impassable darkness
passing before me like whisps in the wind.
God-produced darkness, that darkness like sin,
that lure of the eyes that sought a way in.
Between the two darknesses, dark ghosts of me
stared back, each in turn, each eyeball
to eyeball. I watched as more ghosts
behind and beside me, appeared as from nowhere,
caught between darknesses, trapped as was I.

But still those hands did mesmerise!
A chink of light when curtains just behind the vision
parted and two dolls swam into view.
Not dolls, but mummies rather, human forms
devoid of detail. As featureless as was
the landscape from the start. The hands -
and now a shadow form behind the hands -
manoeuvred them in space, arranged their limbs,
caused one to sit upon a tree stump, one to stand.
But still the scene and they were bland.
More then slid between the curtains into view,
the hands deploying them around the fire.
Some wore grass skirts, but all were onion-like
in texture and in ornament, in markings on the skin.

Yet now was light enough - though gloomy still - to see
some palm trees ranged along a sandy shore,
and out beyond an atoll there, a liner rocked at ease.
The window-dresser slid away to hide himself
against a jet black frame. (He, too was dressed in black.)
God-figure that figured to change or replace the old world
with a form reduced in aspects, focal points and facets,
having fewer of those things that man fixates upon.
The onion-form would reign supreme
in a world devoid of promise and of threat!
A caption in the ocean read : WORLD CRUISE.

But still in the window, the faces of tomorrow
and today stared back towards the sadness that was me
as I looked in... and the god-figure stayed as he was hid.