This poem, from many years ago, is a fantasy about the liminal stage of a rite of passage. Looking back, I can see Celtic sensibility here that I was previously unaware of.

 

A Man I Know

 

A man I know stood beside me.

Looking up at paradise birds

in flight,

he reflected their colours

with steel eyes in blinding

scintillations. Carefully,

he began to speak:

 

“I have found myself surprised

to have fallen through the Earth,

a tunnel black, without sides,

noiselessly. Airless and cocooned

I have lived to tell the tale.”

 

The canopy crackled in paradisiac chaos

as I sat before a cross of embers

and felt the fading wildfire heat

upon my cheek as the ravager sought

drier pastures.”

 

Turning, he became a torrent,

a rainforest stream

to drown his yearning, aching past,

while burning, bursting orchids showed

in the green understorey,

and the day flicked out around him.

 

Christopher Hubbard

Perth. 1995