Author Archives: Damian Garside

OPAL

her soul
be an opal

every shift and
change does she
then scry

Oh this landscape changes
as crazily but not quite with
the speed
    of kaleidoscope patterns
every
      mirror playing its part
in this mandala
of a mosaic

And I watch through smoky glass
or crystal
    to save my eyes from the
ferocity of eclipse

things so clear once, but
now we guess that clarity
came at the price of
intransigence, the need
for that which
could not
          survive exposure
to be parked, obscured,
in some
    instances simply hidden

once we
          gave ourselves the licence
to call out such practice, challenge
those assumption,
mock and ridicule and
                  turn the overwrought symbolism
into brute carnival

once we loved
          that licence, rebelled in it

but
      as she says
      as she says

we are not
    allowed to read the world this way, see
  what we did see

the fiction is
steeped in the so-called
refinement of all Technicolor