Nursery Ceiling

That patterns on the ceiling could be so deceiving,

so revealing!

With every windshift, leafshift in the light

of sentinels helmeted against the fight

against the dark, lining the cobbles.

I knew it wouldn't last. I took

those days for bubbles.

Reading a lovely, ancient book,

I knew they wouldn't last: those days.

Spider was death; he filled the rose-strewn

comers with a loathing and a boding, rough-hewn

like Great-Grandfather Hermann's granite name:

that bone-stone, that grey-red, dried-blood hunk.

(I knew that it would last.)

They shift now, even now, across the screen-

oh screen, oh retina of ageing mindful mint,

impressed with this-is-richness bursting the bins:

of undercover joys and hidden-in-hemstitch sins

that never lasted, but they grew and flew

into the spider's home and hung and harried.

I knew the years would never hold the horde they carried!