Nightwalker

Second poem from S D Anugyan’s poetry book, Here Are The Empire Builders!

The Seeker returns resolutely to victim status, that of a poor little rich girl trapped by her father’s vast empire. I have to confess here that Flora in Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece Chance was a huge influence, and generally I was tapping into a time when the British empire was at its peak, and seemingly invincible. The spiritual failure that the Seeker here is detecting doesn’t register at all in the patriarchal society around her.

I was employing a ‘steampunk’ style – though I didn’t know it at the time – where modern technology is put in a Victorian context. This served an interest in exploring a greater universe where the recurring themes of expansion and contraction would be in evidence, no matter where humanity was in terms of evolution.

Our Flora makes the best of a bad situation, as women have had to do for centuries, but her heart is broken and she wanders her vast mansion at night, sleepwalking, like a ghost. She doesn’t exist as a person yet. Meanwhile, the dominant narrative passes from father to son, through brutality and a blindness towards what is really possible. Thus, true potential remains denied to all.

She can’t know.
They’re ugly as destiny,
She’s weary of enterprise,
Colossal space-freighters dragging
Blocking the light-stars
Way above the tree-tops scratching
The universe.It ends with a crash.
Her father’s footsteps in every hall.
But alone struggling with the make-up,
Imagine the suitor mornings that may be
Coming from distant lands.
She could have had worlds.
‘Here is your Christmas gift,
And when your birthday…’
Getting out of bed she drowns,
Struggling for air on the night-surface,
She dreams
Gliding from room to room.
Blessèd ghost.

Pillow creased by tear-valleys.
See, witness
Sheep wired with the bitter weather
Huddled together around a poor tree,
Dark project of machines
White as empty light.
Like to touch her.
Books scattered on the carpet
She made once,
Icicle patterns on the window,
Pain deep as love. The first cut.
Secluded from rage
And hate
And blind gut-anger handed
Father to son
Lazily escaping from shadows
With green trees, summer lightning,
And horses galloping in fields.