Dead Fairies

A late Summer Thursday afternoon

and dreaming

I revisit the garden of my childhood Spring

two merciless, samurai leylandii 

preaching 

across the grass

the cherry tree, rope ladder strung from its lower branch

the prunus, spotted with blossom buds and busty bullfinches

closer to the house, a small slope against which we handstood

or rolled down on daisy afternoons

over here 

to the right, the old widowed shed

racked with bikes and plant pots and rakes

shelves of powders

against ants and slugs and fungus

I step behind it

to rediscover the dank hiding place

where golden rod stems snagged socks

where spiders the size of apples waited for sandalled feet

where fence panels, slipped from between posts,

have sidled to the ground and dried to a silver grain

and here next to the bald tennis ball and a decaying shuttlecock

I find the tumbled grave of small bones and dried hair

of shattered gossamer film

I pull small rot-welded corpses of dead fairies one from another

here where magic died 

and wishes made 

yet unbelieved

were finally abandoned