Your Dream Home

The glittering river of the kingfisher's swoop,
the nourishment of the willows
and the children's pure delight in play -
this is an escape. Or rather, it is a preface to one.

By this Bruegelian idyll the poets are taking a nap,
the women are drowning their clothes in the river,
the cobbles are sweating their moisture.
Forms drift like vapour through a close net of dimensions.

You think of their dream homes,
blue and white on the Costa del Sol
with lemons growing in confident clumps
and no shadow of a midge at all
and the dogs that dance with the sprinklers
that baptise the outlying wall.

All your curtains are drawn.
The bread on the table is dead.
The Good Lord's sun
bleeds the room's corners orange and red.

You judged each living being
with no one close to ask why.
And as for you, your dream home
is a place in which to die.