Peter Pan

A Poem: After John Berryman

Night Woods (Sintra, 2025)

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When I was a child, my community’s rites of passage included taking adolescents into the woods and leaving them alone to pass the night with neither fire nor light. Now, decades later, as I reflect upon this memory, I’m struck by how quickly the mind itself became my enemy. How in the end, the sunrise was not so much a victory over the cold or the darkness, but a triumph over my own irrational fear.

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Peter Pan

What is the boy to do now
the cedars are all darkening
and the redolence of decay
is no longer masked by smoke?
He has called out to his tribe
since the morning. His voice
is withered like a flame.

Now he whispers hoarsely
an old prayer of his people
as the crepuscular choristers
answer only to each other.
Where does the warm hearth
steam with a mother’s supper
while he’s shrinking from thirst?

Soon, a sound will sharpen him
like a spear that leans to windward
and the lean haft of his courage
must reach into empty pitch.
He will feel that strangler vine
embracing the spongey column
whose rot is full of arachnids.

I want your flesh so badly,
the earth will seem to say;
I want to draw you nearer,
to fill your mouth with clay.
When the last, barren nest
is swaying on proud boughs,
the birds will fly away.

But I am not that lost boy
in the trembling teeth of a storm.
Already my laughter echoes
wherever feathers are scattered.
The child-cradling ground has
been waiting for me forever;
it can wait for one day more.

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