Walled Garden

from Change in the Wind

Great garden walls

echo the voices of children within,

and bamboo jungles scrape the sky

above my outstretched schoolboy limbs.

I search beneath the mesh of sound,

gurgling water, flittered song,

to find a silence that will bind

the meaning, I glean beneath the weave.

Winds that pass through purple grasses

mimic the voices of playing children,

but inside the rhododendron den I still wait;

crouched inspector of this adult state.

                                                   ©Copyright Niall OConnor 2013