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TOO MANY CHILDREN FOR ONE GARDEN

  

It was the sort of sun that towed our children

into the garden. The heat had ironed it

to a bright stave, and there were midges about,

a grace-note or two. Into his midget chair

we’d worked our younger. On the steps my daughter

jumped with her mad mates and I had some doubt if

there weren’t too many children for one garden.

Think of the sun dizzy in so many veins!

  

Two gnats in their blood-crazy cosmos did not

have to think. Like scramblers on a wall of life

they knitted an insistent trail of guesses,

their puny gravities joined like hands across

the descending light. Or desisted and wove

figures of eight. And who could blame them for that

between the bird table and the apple tree?

Or one dodged, a dragonfly smudge, the other

tumbling after to shadow love down the sun.

Or more came and they hung like elastic seeds

of unapparent grapes, drunk upon daylight.

  

Or a new one switched on: it would switch off soon,

like all these atoms burning the atmosphere,

these instant selves that hurried to outstrip light:

they’d warp away, happy derelicts of time,

flickering, playing. But before they had gone,

did they not hieroglyph in our green cosmos

with red backwater blood an unwearied god?

  

They seemed so sure, I thought, that perhaps so long

as the garden held such clever mites it might

just be world enough for so many children.

Alan Marshfield

  

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