The Poetry of Richard Sansom
Published by The British Sansom Society
Dragon-flies and Sunlight
Dragon-flies and Sunlight
 
My reality finds me –

I don’t want it to.

 
I want the heart of a dragon-fly,

a blue one, with gossamer wings.

 
I wish, for a brief moment,

to be a very tall tree,

my sap moving steadily

meaning I am alive,

and only that.

 
And for another moment,

to be just a piece of iron ore,

buried under a great mountain.

 

(I could have said gold,

but too many connotations.)

 

I wish these things

since when I wake each morning

and the sun lights up the curtains,

there seems to be a monster

of decisions waiting for me,

even amid that golden light,

which should bode well

for the man at peace.

 

It is Sartre versus Buddha,

both saw suffering as our lot,

but Sartre was hardly beatific,

and Buddha was,

because he saw redemption

in the most simple pieces

of awareness

that lay sprinkled in our paths.

 

I know of what I am composed,

this uninteresting collection of matter,

that could be (and may have been)

culled from a swamp or desert,

and that I began functioning

when the universe was formed,

and arrived by happenstance

on the absurd door

of my own unique fate.

 

So, I wish for purity of mind,

I wish for a cleansing,

I wish for a single revelation

that my regrets and mistakes

are nothing more than dead leaves

that cover the earth.

 

This is why my reality

tracks me like a blood hound,

sniffing my path,

with a burly mass of authority

holding his leash,

and my reality finds me,

and I don’t want it to.

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