Where is the child
Who has moved through thirty winters
Since he watched his father
Try to bowl a cricket ball
And who, by careful coaching elsewhere
Understood, that the action of his arm was wrong,
Scribing through the child’s unblemished run
Of seven faultless summers, a clumsy arc,
Which sent the ball too wide,
And called from restless slumber
A spectre of uncertain shape and size.

Where is the child
Who saw his father’s failure
Force derision from each watcher’s eye
And shared their scorn, yet was ashamed.

Where is the child
Who learned too fast
The legacy of adoration,
And impotently sent imaginings
From fevered nights to boil
Each mocking eye in blood.

Where is the child
Who felt confusion; anger,
Then, the dormant seed of virulent contempt
Germinate, strike root, grow, bud and bloom,
Finding instantly, a fallow vein
In which to flower for his father’s sake.

Where is the child?
Where is the child now?

His desolation lives between these lines.
His uncomprehending eyes plead from every word,
At each full stop he mutely tries to speak.

Just once, his hand stretched from this page
To touch my own.

©James Rainsford 2010

The intensely loved and cherished child,
Can suffer late.
Waiting innocently through,
The too few summers
Spent in total love.

Above him still, the parents’ strength
Prescribes the length
His loving years shall run,
Before time’s taint reveals his ancient face
Beneath the slowly peeling paint
Of pictures placed
To keep the knowing day at bay,
And stay completion of the plan
To mould the clay, in such a way
He grows a sold, and silent man.

Unless time slays his shining sun.
To extinguish all sensation
In one swift and savage stroke,
Before a doubt is spoken,
Or, disaffection’s woken
From his learning touch.

He perhaps, expects too much.
Such is the faith of infants
Safe within their fragile skin,
So thinly wrought in thoughtful art,
That the heart’s wild wishes can depart,
But disenchantment can’t see in.

© James Rainsford 2010

How many thoughts depart
each time a mind goes out?
How many brilliant, or dull dreams,
does death disperse?

Who will wonder why
when we’re all gone?

© James Rainsford 2010

Reasons like seasons are changeable,
And bend to fit the action’s needs.
Reeds swayed by summer breeze
are often more substantial
than the ‘whys’ we give to
those, who wish to know the
causes for the pauses in consistency.

© James Rainsford 2010

To Martin in Memorium

There was a moment when you seemed to reach perfection.
When expression, word, gesture, touch, look, understanding,
demeanor and desire coalesced, creating for your friends,
an envelope of hope.

Such wholeness can’t endure.
Nor could we witness, or preserve its force
with meagre words.

But even though the moment, like you,
has passed beyond recall,
One friend at least, remembers when
Your presence altered space, slowed time,
bent sunbeams, so we moved in light.

©James Rainsford 2010

Beyond the limit of what can be said,
Is this terrible pain in my heart.
In my head,
Move the words which I fashion
To carry the weight
Of a knowledge
They weren’t built to bear.

They buckle and bend
Into cliché or worse,
As I try to make verse
Tell all that I know.

Beyond language
Lies a loneliness
Too profound for words.

© James Rainsford