Temporal Displacement:

I drove down a modest lane today,

Grass cluttering the centre,

Nature’s scrawny Mohican,

Passing twisted, aged houses,

Their tired, sun-bleached shutters

Closed, time-weary sentinels

Against the heat of the leaching sun,

That which had laid a sleep-calling

Cloak of soft lethargy and torpor

Upon the parched earth,

Where ere my eyes would travel.

All was hushed, still,

Silent as a tomb, long forgot,

But for me.  Birds sang not,

The trees whispered no secrets,

As the cattle, lying in their shade,

Chewed cud, contemplating

The shimmer of sun-kissed buttercups;

And the world lay, somnolent.

All was peace.

Suddenly, jolting my incurious mind,

An astounding sight upon me fell,

From within an unassuming roadside glade

I had noticed ne’er before;

There, secure in an isle of shade

And tranquillity, beside a small,

Crystal-cool and calling pool

A woman kneeled,

Her hunched back to me,

Long, grey hair tied up,

Piled upon her head,

Her simple crown.

Rocking slightly, she was,

As though to some inner melody,

Recalling some dance, perchance,

Her youthful steps,

Both quick and assured,

Until her true love

Had swept her off her feet. 

Thus did she, caught in a reverie,

Her Monday morning washing,

And laid it soft upon the grass

For the sun’s sapping embrace.

Instantaneous, it occurred,

And wildly vertiginous;

I was thrown within a vortex

Which hurled me back in time,

One hundred years or more,

With me an interloper from another age,

In my raucous, polluting machine,

While she perceived me not at all.

I stared, shook my bewildered head,

And drove on then, more slowly and

Thoughtful than before,

A touch fearful, in truth,

Pondering if it was as

I had felt it to be?

And in that uncertain moment

A gargantuan, yolk-yellow

Combine Harvester, a timely

Futuristic juggernaut, materialised

Directly in my path,

Driven nonchalantly by he

Who appeared but a boy,

Steadying my reality once more,

Anchoring me to the nowness of now,

A rolling rock within the slow,

But inexorable,

River of time.

And so it was I shrugged,

Laughed a little at my uncertainty,

And with the shadows upon the road,

Of trees whose seasonal chronology

Marks each passing year, all forever lost, 

Took my temporary temporal displacement,

To the warm and timeless certainty of home

Where illusory reality dances

To my time and tune …

For now.