Mary's Bridge


Mary Forest walks a bridge
Across a gully steeped in mist
As on a stair not actually there
She treads her way upon the air
Each stepful, a half-pace to a truth never found
Before the consecutive heel meets the ground
In just such a nick of delirious time
Her stumbles are kept from falling
Callous inglorious depths
Blind through fog, the whitest of fears
Sensing her ridicule by silenced jeers,
Pierced by the angry jutting of chins
Of rugged scorn on opposed rockfaces
Massively dropping to their temporary bases
Where the merest trickle of the sharpest doubt
Is the blade that gouged the entire gorge out.
Crossing these breaches of self-infliction
Are the bridges that span self-belief's suspension
Where the stalwart traverse the humped back stone
Anchored from whence and toward,
While Mary is offered only upturned bellies
Of rotting timbers, unsecured,
Over which she now scrambles
To the loud snap and crack
Of a long strained hope too ferociously yearned.

Mary washes her sorrows with sins.                



                                                                               2



Midway across is an icy draught
That creeps through flesh and catches hearts
On a note of pain in the key of flight
Its perfect pitch kills the beat of life
To leave its victims turned to stone
Standing upon the bridge alone
As if before an invisible door
Forbidding an entry that cannot be seen
By its own non-existence its closure remains
In equidistance from losses to gains
Where souls sway as the raging trees,
Rooted, yet flailing in the mounting breeze,
The Herald of Almighty Storm.
In the wake of The Storm not arriving
Comes weariness in place of calm
That might have rewarded her patience,
Her waiting, her withstanding harm.
But incentive is a vague nostalgia,
A perspective of sepia'd passio
n and pain,
A leeching of colour from a prime desire
Necessary to Mary's creative fire
Long since extinguished by a rain-sad cloud
Dissolving belief to build self-doubt
As a phantom bridge of crumbling pride,
A disintegration to no other side.



                                                                                3

Mary Forest does not fall,
There is no vertiginous gorge at all.
The drop is Delusion harnessed to Desire
Where Sorrow and Disappointment conscientiously conspire
To lead her across Humiliation's rift
On the pride broken back of an illusory bridge
And suspended so high in her dizzy minds eye
A life-locked, death-white, bone chilled fright
Has muted true talent, once forthright,
Now left at half-mast to Vocation's call,
A ragged flag in a bitter squall,
Tattered by the hoists of expectation.
Disastrous insignia flown to distraction
That were better folded deep in the hold
Of some secret vessel that might chart a life
Without emblem or figurehead inviting dissipation
Of the one sure course and true.
For while Tall Ships are dispatched to port after port
Of Umbridge, Pique and the Cape of Forlorn,
Their rudders shifted by others' scorn,
The sea-mist boats and low grey barges
Steer their own invisible voyages
By the hand of self-recognition,
Through storm after storm, past fear and submission,
To the places that shout "AHOY".      




                                                                             4

Mary Forest has known such a place,
"Ahoy" and welcome to this sacred space
Of knowing who you are and what you must do
Without recourse to the counter view
With which others will try to wear you down
By the glower of a strange and eerie frown
That understands nothing of a Path or Way
But fearing your success, insists you stay.
So Mary has embarked on her peculiar Life,
Undaunted but aware of its inevitable strife,
And so she strode far and wide,
Bonny and bold with nothing to hide.
'Til an evil twang from an enemy bow
Shot an accurate arrow from her crown to her toe.
Poison tipped and poison barbed,
It fastened its septicaemic fear,
Year, after year, after year, after year,
Bringing Mary to the fever of her hallucinatory bridge
Where from such parallel, pre-constructed crossing,
Her foe, already maimed, had maliciously aimed.
And Mary will duplicate the venomous quiver
Should the malignance grow and her soul not deliver
A formula once lost as a remedy regained,
And by this rediscovery reinstating the pure,
Walk from her bridge by miraculous cure.