One of my favourite poems

[annwfyn]

Electra, by Sally Purcell

'In my dream I stood in a grey land
that had never known tree or sun,
and a little crooked wind blew from nowhere
fretting my hair;
under tarnished heavy clouds
distance or direction were impossible,
no choice could hold meaning.

It was like the salt marshes that creation's gale
streams across in the blackness before day,
but here there was no sea,
here there could be no dawn.

And I slowly remembered fragments
of a life unimaginably distant,
of a child's past, in clefts of time's canyon
freakishly revealed -
my green dress, my toys and games,
all my broken morning.

This is everyman's unknown home, they
                                                    murmured,
end of journey for stylite and conquistador -
alone before a tomb in a faceless land,'

All this eternal while Orestes, avenger
is hastening down great roads to return to
                                                    that tomb.