Footsteps in the Ginger

I lay face down on the ginger earth
At the door to the door of my dream
Slicing the plump apple sky
As it swum in an ocean of cream.

Sugar-puffs drifted high overhead
And a clock hid its face with its hands
For time had lost its slippers
A-dancing on the sands…

A-dancing on the sands, my love
A-dancing on the sands – 
All the fish in the air and the birds in the sea,
Not one of these dancers ever saw me – 
Not one of these dancers ever saw me.

They danced away to the tunes of the wind
While the fox with a fiddle played his last encore,
Till the only trace on the ginger earth
Were footsteps which led through a door
To a door….

Words & Woodcuts – an anthology of witty nonsense poems and original woodcuts by Charlotte Cory. An hommage to Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Child’s Garden of Verses is mimicked here (for reasons explained in the Introduction).