Imagination is a thin frail thing

Imagination is a thin frail thing,
A door to worlds unborn, untold:
It slips silent through the ring,
Spreads wing,
Grows bold,
And leaves me for all my strength within its hold

Fettered by laws divine, a faery’s land
Of billow, rhyme, inconstancy,
The roots of rootless Time,
Upswelling flows that mock the fold
And crash my soul to judder in minds gold,

Not cold, not hot, another place’s heat,
Far kinder, softer, gentler, fleet,
Where ancient’s young, young’s born sturdy as the old,
Feelings fly, ideas stamp up their mould

And vision stretches broad its fling,
The dust is mud, the fool a king,
And logic hides a weary eye,
With leaps, with bounds the mind can fly,
And simple mate with complex, make no lie -
And now this fiend is strong and will not die,
Consuming, crazed, the savage cry
That eats my brain, Oh why? Oh why?
I’ve let it free, this curse,
And cannot shy from seeing with another eye
What children see,
Reality,
A touch stranger than I’m used,
A better truth that holds my soul in reverie -
This world must flee before a land revealed to me.

October 15th 1999