La Biche - Richard Fleming

This is the age of clarity:
we know more than our fathers did.
Vulgarity, celebrity,
exposure of what has been hid,
has made us seem immune to fear:
in short, disdainful, cavalier.
But when, returning from a bar,
through labyrinthine, narrow lanes
in old St Martin’s parish, far
from lights and noise, the wind complains,
the bushes sigh and move apart,
fear, beyond reason, grips the heart
and suddenly, instinct, within,
alarmed, awakes to fight or flight.
The child, inside the adult’s skin,
feels terror in the starless night,
imagining an outline, stark,
twin-horned, approaching through the dark.

Richard Fleming