Peter Pan
A Poem: After John Berryman
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.
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. -




Spectacular!
Intense, striking imagery. Berryman would approve, I think (dream song 55?)