for Joanna Gooding and Simon Curtis
Here is too narrow and brief:
equality and justice, to be real,
require the timeless. It argues
afterlife even to name them.
I’ve thought this more since that morning
in barren country vast as space-time
but affluent with cars
at the fence where my tightening budget
denied me basket-room
under the haunches of a hot-air balloon
and left thirteen people in it,
all ages, teens to grans,
laughing excitedly as the dragon nozzle
exhaled hoarse blazing lift, tautening it,
till they grabbed, dragged, swayed
up, up into their hiatus.
Others were already aloft,
I remember, light bulbs against the grizzled
mountain ridge and bare sky,
vertical yachts, with globe spinnakers.
More were being rigged, or offering
their gape for gusts of torch.
I must have looked away—
suddenly a cry erupted everywhere:
two, far up, lay overlapping,
corded and cheeked as the foresails of a ship
but tangled, and one collapsing.
I suppress in my mind
the long rag unravelling, the mixed
high voice of its spinning fall,
the dust-blast crash, the privacies
and hideous equality without justice
of those thirteen, which running helpers,
halting, must have seen
and professionals lifted out.
Instead, I look at coloured cash and plastic
and toddlerhood’s vehement equities
that are never quite silenced.
Indeed, it prickles, and soon glares
if people do not voice them.