Spinning Wheel

Belted to spindle and bobbin, and poised 
like a she-goat, on three turned legs.
This hoop of wood — lathed and curved and made to spin.
A universe in its revolutions; in rotation, all of time.

There is a woman locked in this stone-walled cell.  
She sits alone, and draws her hair across her weeping.

Silken fibres on the distaff: a cloud, a swath, a fairy host;
(a dream of your subconscious, mutable and strange).
A hundred phantom faces flicker in the candle’s light.

Down in the glen, a goblin, rattling the fence posts,
singing in the dusk — gleefully — his name.  (Your life
and that of those you love, if you can speak it back to him.)