Thursday 18 June 2009

Someday

Someday I am going to have a country. A small kingdom nestled into Alpine meadows where a young river, clear and sharp as cut glass, laughs like starlings as it clatters over the grey stones. They will speak Esperanto or Romansch or some other strange tongue that slides through lexicons like a canal barge, no need to pause, no time to punctuate. Through their hands passes money bearing portraits of people long since forgotten, in a shade of green that merely confirms their sickly deaths, their purgatory task being the guardians of currency. Flags wave languidly in the summer breeze as hay and honeysuckle stir the hanging folds of blue and silver cloth in a futile attempt to instil a little patriotism. A village, the capital, with cobbled streets and louvre shutters that are peeling scarlet paint at a rate of knots, is content to sleep in a peaceful equity of pomp and circumstance. Generals, colonels, lords and their ladies stroll the streets as though on clouds of superiority, moustaches waxed, hats burnished with feathers. Above them all the castle stands, a petrified sentry, tired and heavy in its old age, its service no longer necessary.

Someday.

1 comment:

  1. you always had a beautiful way with words, alex. you create such great imagery

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