Falling Up

A crafty faun stares, backlit by a silvering sun with skirts trailing.
His eyes are set side-slant and a small girl stands thumb in mouth as he capers. I am unsteady. Time shimmers and wraps a wavering arm about me. In a middling space, three people play madrigals. Their toes point like accusations. They dance courtly steps through my memory. Moving in repetition. Arms out as if blind. I feel a soundless resonance within. Thumps and booms of battle rumble. Leaching up from behind. The hair on my neck hackles and the sun opens its arms wider still. Ale is sold from a makeshift tent and I stumble toward it. The smell of hops is a poultice upon the sharp sound of voices.
 
The air shimmers. I walk, cloaked in insignificance. I turn and turn as directions skein together. Long skirts whisper over grass.
Velvet ladies and fustian peasants mingle in a warp of distance.
I do not know my place and nerves tickle in my gut.
Nearby the Duke of York is striding. He pushes me out of the way and I instinctively curtsey, afraid of recrimination.
 A Knight rubs his armpit where armour chafes. Dulled chain mail weights him. He sweats darkly. Dragging like an ape though the crowd.
I smell him, rank as a blown horse. Behind him, his Lady sobs and I avert my eyes. There is soft peripheral blurring. My heart thuds.
 
Sounds of the hammer and tongs boom from the armourers forge.
I feel the heat like a punch and flinch like a frightened bird. Linen clad maidens hawk household goods. They caw for money like head-dressed crows. I wonder if I am one of them. They twitch like nervous horses with one eye on the distance. On the blankness of the wind. Hoof-thunder is written. In an avalanche of sound ,war-cries roar over me. I start in fear as time turns over. Everyone runs, screaming. I feel a shove and sprawl. I hear my shin-bone crack. Hooves thud and flash. My scream is unheard.
I fall up and join a thousand ghosts that cluster on the altered air.


*This poem was inspired by the Tewkesbury Medieval Fair. I thought of a person moving back to their death in a previous life,during the Battle of Tewkesbury.

Miki Byrne

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