Flight

				After Gerry Davis’s, exhibition ‘Burrow’.

				
Picture a pram in a dark, empty warehouse 
where a child waits to be requisitioned. Salvation 
beckons in the smell of soap on the wind that crackles 
through washed sheets on a line, surges 
in the song of a stonechat perched on a fence.

Picture a young man trapped inside his own jacket
contorted by the effort of trying to escape it, 
of trying to get his head above his own shoulders;
whole days spent stumbling down dead-end paths
trying to side-step the memories that left him marooned 
on a ditch like a trailer with a missing wheel. Listen
for the songs he always meant to sing, stranded mid-air,
drowned out by a plane that flies over the empty chair
he dragged into the middle of the road.

Picture him as he clambers out of the plane-crash 
of his past and climbs onto that chair, looking up 
to greet returning swans and catch in his outstretched arms 
that brief moment before they lose their airborne grace -  
the chance benediction of a child who still waits.

IMAGE: Ghosts, Oil on Canvas, 183 x 152 cm, 2012. Gerry Davis©