by Matthew M. C. Smith

 

A father and a son, 1980s

My father wakes me, takes me out in the garden
by flickering torchlight. The stars are exceptionally bright

and what time is it – midnight? There’s a warm breeze through the garden.
Birdflap, dogbark, ruffle, rustle, roosting, and cooing. And then a settling.

Neon peripheral side-light, orange rinsing gleam, a distant city hum felt as rising hairs.
I snatch his thin wrist, dry and a little cool, as I stumble on a paving slab.

He slides through the shadows diagonally, like a chessboard knight
and we walk past the willow tree hanging over like a bristled, spent god.

The dogs are snooping shadows and we stop in the anklegrass
as he points upwards, shining his torch; ‘look up’, he says to his kid,

and I look hard for the whizzing chrome shell from Flight of the Navigator
or a bike flying with a covered alien in a basket, a silhouette of a boy,

but there’s no moon and no Apollo 11 burning up, no Starship stream
for steady gazers; no warp speed. Somewhere, William Shatner

might be consulting Uhura on intergalactic navigation but I see just one meteorite
and stand in damp slippers. Our thin lightbeam pricks massive expanses,

at its darkest overhead, and we see suns and star clusters, perhaps long dead.
Our feeble light breaks through, ever onwards, a microflash

through spiral arms in deep space. Unbelievable ghostspeed.
We are playing, it is replaying, and somehow, we move closer.

 

 

 

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Matthew M. C. Smith is a Welsh poet with work in Poetry Wales, Arachne Press and Barren Magazine. Matthew is obsessed with Star Wars, Sci Fi, astronomy and deep time. He is campaigning for the return of the ice-age relics, the Red Lady of Paviland to Wales from Oxford. Matthew is on Twitter @MatthewMCSmith as well as Instagram and Facebook. Matt edits Black Bough Poetry.