In The Evening, Where The Deserts End

In the evening, when my heart

is full as the sky is of stars,

then I will go out to the dunes of

sand that stretch endlessly to the sea, and

there I will wait.

In the sparkling

starlight of the night, I will wait

for you,

and when you come we will leap

hand in hand

down slopes that fall away under our feet until

we can fly,

and together we will soar

through the night like fruitbats,

great, leathery wings of belief

pinning us in the sky.

We will dip and twist and glide and turn, and

when we have flown high enough, your hand clenched

tightly in mine like we are locked together forever,

we will reach the stars.

The sand will stretch below like a sea,

waves of sand frozen in place only

by time and perspective, and

we will see that the boundaries of our desert

are finite;

that the barrenness of our minds comes to

an end;

and that outside it all is fertile.

Together

we will swoop back to the ground and remember

what we have seen from our vantage

point of the stars: we will walk onwards

with steps that achingly climb, only to slip

back halfway to where they came from, and

our muscles will burn

as we scale the heights of our

disappointments

– but we will not forget.

We have been to the stars,

and they have shown us:

the desert too will

end.

One day, we will find the fence, and scale it.