Cabin fever

Cabin fever

The windows were small
and the rain fell steadily for days
on the village green.
She was starved of light,
beaten about in the wind by rain.

She raged at darkness,
the heavy beams pressing downwards, in.
She was a mouse cornered by a cat
she was demented by cabin fever
she was a hunter savaging herself as prey
she was a caged tiger.
Go anywhere near her, she’d lash out
like a tormented creature
who had lost all the faculties in her brain.

Then the sun suddenly came
and she gentled.
Light filled the room to its corners.
She slept in its warmth,
curled round herself like an ammonite
oblivious to the slow ticking
of centuries.

What savagery.
What peaceable quiet mildness.
Two animals, one wild one tame
in a single frame
and the whole damn drama
to go over again and again and again.