Poetry by Maureen Wilkinson

The Amnesiac's Dream

The Amnesiac's Dream won 1st Prize in the 1990 Peterloo International Open Poetry Competition.
It has been published in the Guardian and numerous poetry journals, and is included in my collection
THE BLINDMAN GOES FROM A TO B published by Peterloo Poets. A signed copy may be PURCHASED HERE...

The Amnesiac’s Dream

It seems my face is now a race of clouds:
Some of them dragons, some of them galleons,
or birds, or ghosts of words, or brief charades.
You must excuse me shouting, but my mouth’s
a dome of wind.  I really don’t know who
sent all these dreams, the one about a bowl
of yellow sand, the one about a grave
shaped like a woman’s body made of sky.
The one about the edge that shapes away
into a blindman’s template, and you have
to guess its continent.  I keep consulting
oracles: I’ve been the Empress, the Moon
and the Hanged Man.  I have been swords
crossed in a corn field. I’ve loosed flocks of birds
from my raised hands.  They sky-write in a swarm
of rapid hieroglyphics which reveal
my name, my future, everything, except
I can’t decipher it quite fast enough
to keep pace with the tempo of their wings
erasing air’s white pages, which contain
the poem of myself, which I forgot.

At the same time it seems I am a void
in which impressions darken without trace,
while secretly inside me they remake
this landscape, like the network of a brain
without a wiring diagram.  It seems
I am a crazy bank of films
with different plots, but playing all at once;
a shadow play, a child’s construction kit
made up with some improbable mistakes.
It seems I am decked out in all my loves.  My fingerprints are made
of your warm skin, and time is scars and banners, and it seems
my bones are bedrock granite sunk so deep
they cannot speak, though they know everything.
It seems as if my throat’s an unknown song.
It seems the tides are levied by my breath.
It seems that I might drown in memory.

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