The People We Meet In Dreams
The man from the town centre post office bangs your door
in a ruby cape mouthing the whereabouts of The Prowler,
and then is gone, down to the shudder of the village stream,
where they are all scattered on the brink of a public hanging.
Not that you are you and he is him exactly, but there’s
always the hard seed of a person through which we recognise them.
That, for example, is absolutely how your mother would shout:
“The steeple is burning! Take your wives and tie them to the chairs!”
and that is quite the way she would run la-di-da down Coal Pitt Lane.
We brush them with our eyelashes as they rear into the half-dark
before we have the chance to follow the trail of crumbs
that might bring us winding back to roads taken and taken and taken.
(first published in Smiths Knoll, Issue 49)
Miranda Yates is a primary teacher who lives in the High Peaks with her baby son, partner and dancing step-daughter. Recent work has been published in The Rialto, Poetry Review and Under the Radar.
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