The voice, a breath on a breeze,
stellar, shining, white feather floating,
scattered stardust, soft twinkle,
a warm whisper close to my ear

”Yes, the light was the beginning,
the beginning of the myth,
the myth that brought us all here,
the myth that we had to be.”

”Then the stars gathered round
humming and singing,
singing celestial sound.
The world started spinning,
spinning the loom of itself.”

”No one said, LET THERE BE LIGHT!
Light was, light is.
There is light and darkness,
it’s shadow.”

”But in the great-long-forever-timeless-nothingness
it was suddenly 5.15am!”

When I asked for the theatre prompt sheet
for the book of love and imagination,
(I already had the script),
she projected this onto a board,
along with a dim, faded photograph
of the Mad Hatter leaning against a screen,
nonchalant, in a space
beside a gap in a tattered curtain.
He had stood still there a long time
a very long time ago.

A crowd of children passed by,
wandering home from school,
pushing, shoving, chattering,
telling how they knocked all the apples down
from the garden wall,
but that wasn’t it at all.
They’d forgotten paradise.