STARSHINE, THE OCEANAND THE UNICORN
Chapter Six                                                                                                   Part Three


                             I have returned to my tower.  I return to my house as I left, with nothing. 
                             I looked back to when I left here.  It was dawn.  I walked many miles through the early mists, then I climbed a hill.  I climbed up high out of the mists and into the sun. I stood on the hill top.  All that I had been was behind me, left in shadow.  I looked out over the world.  A mist lay over it but I knew that it was there.  It was there for me.  I was filled with ecstasy.  I walked its pathways and lanes, I worked its fields and seasons.
                             Colour, texture, sky and earth, summer heat and winter chill, they touched and clothed me and I lived within them.  I ate, I drank, I slept, I woke, I ploughed, I sowed, I harvested.  I made no judgements. My mind was silent.  I toiled, I let my body flow with land and season.  At harvest time and Midsummer's night, farmsteads revelled.  Folks feasted and the fiddler played.  I sang, I danced, I made love to bright eyed maidens whose kisses were warm and yielding, their caresses unhindered, their secrets unsealed and flowing.  All this time I was happy.
                            Then one day the sky was dark grey and a heavy rain fell, I was leading two sturdy shires while Sam guided the plough.  Sam was a man of the land and its creatures.  Sturdy and tall like his horses as he fought his bare chested battle with the soil.  He fought for his family's livelihood come drought or storm and he never lost.  Sweat on muscled shoulders, naked back and muddy arms as he struggled to guide the heavy plough.  Its blades were dragged through thick, wet earth, turning over the brown sticky mud and churning up stones and the dead white roots of the last crop, like scattered bones.  I felt a darkness and a fear.  It filled me.  I did not know whether it was a nightmare not remembered or one not yet seen.  Then I saw the gypsy at the side of the road.  We stopped the plough.  Sam walked over and offered the lonely traveller bread and cheese.  She thanked him for his kindness and she warned him to stay at home with his plough for there was another field of mud and another dark sky across the water from which he would not return.  Sam laughed, his heart did not head her.  She looked at me.  I stood with the horses.  I saw her tired, furrowed face and her deep sad eyes where secrets hide.  Her sorrow was my sorrow.  The darkness is yet to come.
                    So I put away pen and paper and go to war.  The moon is but a fingernail.  Time is still unwound and sleeping.  I am still lost.  I wish I knew her name.