Raffy’s Nap

Laid under trees beside the field above Timberscombe village

where the shadow is cool, and my mother’s jacket, spread on dry leaves,

protects my skin, I sleep in the heat of a late spring morning in England.

The breeze ripples with sounds of lute and flute while grunts of rams

and grulls of ewes, call to lambs that breach the keep in the field above me

and droning bees hum under roasting sun beside budding archeologists.

My sleep – so deep – the edges of now and then cross in silent patterns,

while pottery shards, chips of flint and smelted ore weave history into present

and now into past; a dream that never ends even as I stir and wake

and rise to the ancient hill fort and the school of children upon it.

Curious, they scratch and dig, some painted with blue, the color of woad, in swirls

upon their cheeks, and I rise in surprise when an iron age remnant hidden from sun

for two thousand, seven hundred years, is placed in my infant hand.

“Look,” I tell them, “a pebble.”

 

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