Fred Proud

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The Best Poem Of Fred Proud

Disorientation

With Toni steering our fast capsule
we left the authorised thoroughfares.
Not daring to pause, even for an instant,
we gazed about ourselves in wonder.

For here were unknown landscapes
of lakes, prehistoric mountains - the woolly
animals upon their slopes like white-nits
clinging to the pelts of beached Leviathans.

Tell-tale traces of urban air clung
to our clothes in that cockpit; fear-induced
secretions clogged our pores, but our eyes
drank deep the majesty of wilderness.

Subtle changes of colour swept across
folds and gullies, steeps and escarpments.
The plumes of vapour, wafted by an alien Sun,
wrought a sublimity that forced we City fugitives

to stare in rapture; to unclench our brows
and separately capitulate to private
and renewing disorientation.
The gradations of mauve, pink; dun and ochre;

the tints of lavender and rose unmanned us quite:
delivered us, as if miraculously, to a point
of raw newness. The pell-mell route we had run,
constantly fearful of discovery, faded.

We had been dropped, without preconception,
into these astonishing, silent valleys. It was our prize
and our curse. For sooner rather than later, we had,
by Time's rod and its fabric of trysts and promises

to return to our slavery and leave this paradise.
Closely monitored by the once barely-noted
militia we were again strangers;
the 'silently observed' in a sterile metropolis.

We are 'the disorientates'. We are pregnant.
We are the lost cosmonauts with contraband seed;
memory seed; promise seed - that with each
half-breath open to a another order of understanding.

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