Floating in and out of time, I drift down to settle in
a bucolic scene out of Bruegel. Travelling to market
with mediaeval villagers on a hay wagon, I’m aware
of apocalyptic dangers facing these folk when they
reach town unless they change their ways. How can
I convince them? I don a patriarch’s angular mask
with sharply beaked nose, ferocious black eyebrows
and matted grey hair. Like an Old Testament prophet,
I utter stern warning in a male stentorian voice. Since
the mask is just a thin layer of paper maché on a stick,
I’m surprised when the villagers huddle round the hay
cart, heeding admonition. Hooded heads bowed, they
mutter, hunkered down in a mass. Faded smocks merge
like hillocks, like the humped shoulders of grey aurochs.
The mask stuck back in the hay, I disperse into air, out
of the frame but held aloft in ancestral lore, in chilling
stories told around winter fires to spook the children.