Featured art by Brooke Shaden. Click title image to visit her studio.

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Kate Bush “Cloudbusting”

Take me home
I implore thee
Take me home
For I adore thee
Take me
To the only home I’ve ever known

I have walked this path for many years
Yet always felt like a sightseer
My heart a disposable camera
Wide eyes blinkered by sights I never requested to prize
The only thing I trusted was my sorrow
As it never one time left my side

This companion of mine would not see me abandoned
Before I had served a life sentence
Marking my death day in its calendar
Over and over
Laying a shapeless wreath in the garden of remembrance
Its cadence the slender rain which taps upon my pane
Nesting beneath the overhanging eaves of my eyelids
Its discomfiting verse spoken in hushed tones
As it places a kiss upon my blushed lips

Our little secret
Bulging to the depth and breadth and height of me
Too much to embosom
Seeping through pores silted by the dampened mist of its suggestion
My humid distemper ever more pronounced
Heart never less au fait with its setting
Encased in fired clay
A vision in glazed terra-cotta
That few would discern as less than blessing

Take me home
I implore thee
Take me home
For I adore thee
Take me
To the only home I’ve ever known

Twas December when the snow came
Winters bones scattered like bloodless rose petals before me
Shepherding me deep into the woods
Somewhere
Not certain of the exact location
For this was unlike any path I had ever traversed
But also oddly familiar

Echoes within its delicate breeze
Of grazed knees and German measles
Discarded remnants of a childhood passed
Drowned out by the deafening din of bickering elders
And the railroading of peevish adolescence
Dandelion glow long since gone from my chin
Wearing a smile which sloped like melted butter
Bereft of chastity
As the warmth of my fathers arms had become ever more distant
Now it flooded back with whispers of waspish renaissance
Slender finger pointed beyond a left bearing clearing
To a red maple girdled in curious silvery ivy
Yawning into a discernible hollow
Of sufficient dimensions to swallow a small child entirely
In just one gulp

Glancing down at my bare feet
I began to giggle uncontrollably
Funny things toes
Don’t you know
Each with their very own tiny little shadow

Glancing back up my heart began thumping feverishly
For the hollow was now gaping before me
And I always was an inquisitive child

Come inside

was the sole chant

No, I can’t. Can I?
Whatever would the elders say?
They get angry when I run away out of earshot

But, while the goose is away
The gander are prone to fits of playfulness
And besides, it had been far too long since my last adventure anyway
Wide eyed, I replied

Take me home
I implore thee
Take me home
For I adore thee
Take me
To the only home I’ve ever known

Two entire New Moon cycles passed before we reemerged from the hollow
No longer sightseers
But overseers
Thunderbearing wings opened wide
Heart Crystalline
Wide eyes enraptured by sights yet to be seen

And to think, the only thing I trusted was my shadow
For it has never once left my side

Richard Charles Stevens

Keeper of The Crimson Quill

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