A Midsummer Dream’s Nightmare

Stephen Livesey Ashworth



The broken clock deceives the time displayed,
The dark plays tricks upon my sense of space,
The full moon’s crazy quilt of light and shade
Brings distant things too close before my face.
The silent desert’s false geometry
Unfolds for me a labyrinth of pain –
But then your sunny sensuality
Hugs healing visions, Helen, to my brain.
I reach and hope to clasp your spectral hand,
But grope a mirage in the vacant air
And stumble, till at last I understand:
You were not here, you are no longer there,
And all the dreams of love that I had planned
Wake shivering, again, in cold nightmare.


June 2005