The Waterfall

And in a waterfall, in a part of a forest,
A shadow can be made out
By one who closely watches;
And soon that shadow twists
And becomes as many shapes
And voices can be heard whispering
As the downward stream rages.

Come nearer; come closer; hear our special song.
For once we were as you are
As substance; potent lives.
As weary worldly travellers, exploring and revealing.
Mapping out and marking out
The future in the shaping.

And finance gathers moral thought
With poorly developed consciences
And files them under “weaknesses”
In place of other qualities.
So heartless, we descended into a world too old to age.
Faced with beauty, we, unmoved, built our progressive stage.

We camped and joked of a new time ahead,
And we talked of the chances bidden,
But, slowly, the wood could recognise the qualities we had hidden.

So our play gathered a stationary audience
Whose patient stealth was cultivated beyond our numbed senses.
Late at night, as we dreamed of palaces built in concrete,
One person dreamt a dream of paradise complete.

Lights gazed upon him in his mind as stars shone and beckoned
and in that dream a deadened heart awoke and began to listen.

In the daylight he seemed as much as just before then
Save his private wondering at the scenery infection.
He would spend more time thinking, absorbed inside his world
Whilst his companions simply mocked him, as obsessed with his fortune’s turn.

Then at night he awoke to the sound of running water
And through the forest shadows what he saw lifted up his shoulders.
So stealthily he crossed, then stumbled and crawled
Until he stood at the edge of this self-same waterfall,
And, transfixed, he stared as light flickered on his features.

How long he stood there he never knew
But, shaken from his admirings, he undressed and dived in through.
The next day he awoke as if he had never risen
And looking for the waterfall he found no water bidding.

He told no-one, of course, and merely blamed his thirst
But every night from then on was just as the first.

Now some might say this happened once,
And the one persuaded the rest;
Others tell it beguiled them all
As one or as trees become a forest.

But soon the bather’s dreams began to shape reality

Was he dreaming of a waterfall
Or was he a traveller in a liquid fantasy?

For now we are as shadows in an ever downward stream
With nothing to portray us as what we might have been.
But sometimes at night as moonlight shines upon the waterfall
A dream of substance; of potent lives may occasionally be recalled.