April Promise

Full of April promise
so many times we’d disappear
to where the canal boats moored

make-believing one of them ours
a gypsy craft laden for a simpler life
We’d found our own place to dream

saw the naked sun step down to play
to dance on daisy-strewn fields
leaving us to lay by a twisting stream

cradled by heavy blossom trees
unable to face an unpalatable truth
The holes it burned in our maudlin minds

like never-healing wounds
more vulnerable than the blossom
which fell into torrents below

So it is that a few fine April days
are quickly gone
They never presage a fine summer to come

© copyright David Francis Barker 2011

Unseasonal, I know, but those of us entrenched in the northern hemisphere might want to think of spring.