When Words Fail Try Shadows

When Words Fail, Try Shadows

The child and her grandfather…passed through a dirty lane into a crowded street, and stood, amid its din and tumult, and in the pouring rain, as strange, bewildered and confused as if they had lived a thousand years before, and were raised from the dead and placed there by a miracle.

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

All things considered, in the course of time, dreams

whenever collected in the museum of memories,

such as clichés and storage speech, whole reams

of evidence that lies can be like trees,

leaf up, root down, bark round and round, what seems

absurd is only what has been heard too often

and misunderstood, old tears and broken screams,

once strong enough to hold back fate and soften

lava flows from deep within the soul;

yet now, alas, and woe betide, the gleams

grow dim, the candles flicker, so awful ghoul

and turgid ghost can only vanish into silence,

unsuspected remnant of the nameless science:

afterthought and passion’s form, thus and hence.