Witness

or What the Garden Saw

Witness

(or ‘what the garden saw’)

-

Me eating the middles of daisies,

worms wriggling cool against my palm.

Me lifting stones and seeing Spiders

scuttling into coolness and cuckoo-spit

foam on fronds of Mint nodding yes

in the sunlight of my mind. It even sees

inside the house where now the dolls

in their shoe box ship come

spirited through the air

all the way to Czechoslovakia

and alight in the rockery

coming alive in mountains and stories,

magic and all flesh and bone.

-

The cat show with an audience

of one. A gate crasher, a boy

on the wrong side of the fence.

Me throwing a stone at him.

Us as horses, another show,

this time it’s us jumping

over obstacles but never falling.

-

A tidy 4 year-old,

socks pulled up. With birthday

friends, posing for Dad,

smiling while legs stick

to the sun-scorched

blood-red gloss-painted chair.

-

Me lying winded

after handstand-practice gone wrong.

And It’s always summer.

Me, a teenager sunbathing - looking up

at the volatile clouds. Willing

the sky to stay blue. And later,

a lifetime later when I’ve long left home

me lying face down laughing

in wonder at a dying

velvet rose in front of my face

poised between

life and death,

and it’s always summer,

a French Comic Opera

filling the air.

-

I grew up in a tiny universe of inside, outside in the garden, school and holidays in Scotland - and it was always that garden that provided me with solace that was easy to access. The garden that started out as a patch of soil grew as we grew. In this ‘list’ poem I make the garden my witness, because that is what it feels like now. The garden was alive, especially in the summer, and made me feel alive too. It’s where I played pretend as a child, sun-worshipped as a teen and LSD- tripped as a young adult home for summer. I had Radio 3 on in the kitchen and I could hear it clearly even in the garden with the door closed.

I am also bearing witness in the writing to my changing self - with the garden being an arena of magic and transience.

What is revealed? That I am a sensual being open for magic, I lived in a world of the imagination and still do, but I am not perfect - I can react, I can feel defensive. And even in the garden I was not quite free of the events that took place in the house. There was a desire in me to be a performer, and a host. I only ever did a hand stand into crab once - and it was a practice run that did not go well. Maybe that was the start of a weakness in my back. My sister and I taught ourselves by being captive horses to stay on out feet. I still crave a blue sky.

The garden’s final witnessing was part of my chemical initiation into unity consciousness, my parents still at work - when I lay down and laughed at the vivid beauty and absurdity of it all .