by John Greening

‘Who ever heard of a pleasant dream?
~ Robinson Jeffers

Once again, winding them in and about
the bare branches of our dead apple tree
across the dormant cherry and into an
erupting hazel, I thread buds on a string

trying to recall what pleasant thing
I was searching for in last night’s castle,
unable to retrieve from wherever I buried it
that story with its friendly opening faces.

I twist them up to hang there in the spaces
left by the squirrels and only a vague picture
(like those photos the light had interfered with
in our childhood albums, a ghostly smear)

of a crowd, of a woman taking a broom to clear
display cases, of a hurrying old man
inviting me in Arabic. It all
fades to darkness. But the dream was good.

And so are those pear-drop lights of childhood
that clunk to life and catch for me a distant
era of sweet carols and lit candles
balancing on spruce. This LED

obliterates what it thinks we need not see,
the real stars and their stories, hanging there
like so many irretrievable dreams,
follies a human sky can do without.

John Greening is a British poet, a Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner with over twenty collections, including two from Carcanet. The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022 (Baylor University, USA, ed. Gardner) came out in March. He has edited Geoffrey Grigson, Edmund Blunden, Iain Crichton Smith and U.A.Fanthorpe, plus several critical studies and anthologies, most recently Contraflow: Lines of Englishness. His essays, Vapour Trails, appeared in 2020 and his Goethe translations in 2022 from Arc. There is a forthcoming Rilke. You can connect with John at johngreening.co.uk, on Facebook (john.greening.10), and on Twitter (GreeningPoet).