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Whatever was I thinking! I suppose you might call this freestyle... with attempted rhyme, amongst other things. Yes inspired by the Golden Girl, but also afield of golden wheat near the turning for Glympton Park, near Rowsham Gap; and also by the sculpture Fire Cross, by Graham Carey.
Love and False Redemption.
In the Scala by John Climacus, the twenty third step is
on mad pride and unclean and unmentionable thoughts.
Climbing, ever nearer, reaching step twenty three,
My lost and lonely way did wind and curl;
I was searching for her who would save me,
For a sight of the Golden Girl.
My eyes fell upon a field of wheat, so pliant before the wind.
But my face felt the breeze as a brutal caress
And as I started to undress
I thought of all the times I’d sinned.
I fell into that golden sea
And rolled and crushed those ripened ears.
My madness bare for all to see,
I dismissed all the usual fears.
Scratched and reddened by the ripened wheat
I turned to face the vale below.
Winnowed in the wind and rising to my feet,
I screamed out loud - my Golden Girl, my Golden Girl,
Only you will know.
My scream was a kestrel released to the sky,
It hung, an aural cross on high,
Symbolic of my own despair,
Echoing across the vale,
Carried to the garden where
Each scream was felt as a driven nail
By the Golden Girl.
She cut my words down from the cross
And laid them on the ground.
She kissed each one so tenderly and, without a sound,
She organised them patiently, caressing them so gently
That the meaning rose for all to see,
My Golden Girl, My Golden Girl, I’m found.
I thought I was saved
By the Golden Girl, in pride before the fall.
But I was enslaved
By her mocking eyes and I was in her thrall.
Subjected to her flying flail,
My pleas echoed across the vale,
My pleas rang out to no avail,
And she brushed me off,
My Golden Girl, my Golden Madonna.
Like a husk in the scattered chaff,
I was blown off the Scala.
© John Dunn.
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