DREAMREADING

I wish I knew what that book was -
The one I sometimes find to read
Between the covers of my sleep,
When words appear on clean white sheets,
Rising up from the strange, dark deep
In the faraway, moonlit bay of dreams.

I wish I knew what that book was
Which I read in the starry dark -
Is it a diary of the day,
Recurring in the depth of night,
Floating up, up and then away
In the moonlit bay of castaway dreams?

I wish I knew what that book was -
Is it a never-never book,
Just by the third star on the right,
Always out of reach when I wake,
Sinking suddenly out of sight
In the faraway, moonlit bay of dreams?

I wish I knew what that book was,
Though I suppose I never will,
But deep in the sea of the night,
I know the words will wake again -
They will swim up into the light
In the moonlit bay of castaway dreams.

I wish I knew what that book was,
But I don’t really care at all:
The white sheet reappears and gleams,
And words will race along in lines -
Like these words coming now in streams
In the faraway, moonlit bay of dreams.

(2012)

Occasionally, words running along a shining screen too fast to read appear in my dreams – and that’s where this poem comes from. Quite how it came out as a sort of nursery rhyme, I don’t know, although the image of the Peter Pan island from the Disney film was er, hooked into my mind during the writing. Hence the picture.

THE BLUE TATTOO (1942)

The rhythm of her breathing
Shapes a vision
Of trains leaving cities,
On time and out of time,
Trailing steam
Above hypnotic rails,
Over sleepers
And through tunnels
Of reveries and memories,
Old and new,
Steam-grey, smoke-blue.

‘Move along, move along,’
The guards sneer sing-a-song,
‘It is not your number,
No, not your number,
But vice versa, yes, vice versa.’

History is merely new versions
Of shaven skulls and striped overalls;
Of the showers and the shovels,
And events occurring on another level,
Ash-grey, smoke-blue.

She sleeps shapely
While I lie sick and still,
Awake and at mercy, until
A cry escapes the nursery
Where the infant lies curled
From that other world,
In which dreams never come true,
But nightmares always do,
And the blue tattoo
Runs us all through
And through.


(1980)

Having a baby interfered with my sleep in more than the obvious way.

The sheer scale of the Second World War has always fascinated me. It feels like an age away now and to younger people it probably seems about as meaningful as The War Of The Roses, but when I was a teenager, for instance, it was only a couple of decades past. I count myself very fortunate to have missed that war, but I often wonder what it must have been like to have lived through such times. There have been other holocausts before and after, but the Nazi’s industrial slaughter of the Jews was particularly horrific. As I suggest elsewhere, the fear of a future nuclear Armageddon cast a shadow over parenthood for me, but so did recurrent sleeping and waking dreams of being a family caught up in The Final Solution.

This poem has long been waiting for a picture and last week in Liverpool it finally arrived - more by luck than judgement. We were waiting for a train at the James Street station and I was fascinated by the ‘Dream Passage’ wall sculptures over the track. It was only after taking the picture that I realised it would go perfectly with this poem.