A Voice Poem by Rory Hudson

Through distances of arid time
a voice, half-remembered, half-dreamed,
cuts through the painful skin
that I wear as my disguise
of blood and bone and meat
rotting already in the ageing of my days.
It cuts in the pit of my stomach,
where I cannot possess it,
where, rather, it possesses me,
and sings out, sad but strong,
the sound of what has gone before,
almost now alien to my ears,
accustomed as they are
to silent absences of thought
and waters lapping quietly at the edges of life.

It will find you, too, such a voice,
if you will be still and listen
under the bridge between time past and time yet to come,
under the arc of the sky that cannot be measured,
on days when no shadows are thrown,
on days when all children know their future in the past that is forever -

and then
a boisterous rattle of rain comes bursting from the sky -
the ground is wet with the wonder of wild days
and the air saturated with the sound of the voice that sings
outrageously from within, winging across the world:
the tune is the tune of a strange truth,
a truth that knows you,
and a truth
that you will die for.