Paint Box: House 1 St Fagan's

Colours are bright this wet morning:


blue smoke, red walls, green grass,
a tree still wearing its gauzy evening gown
of lichen - a revealing south, modest north -
but the once-golden thatch


is now a sodden grey,
harbouring spiders, nesting birds and burrowing mice.
Better then to sleep downstairs
cutched away in a box


next to Mam's roaring fire
and the dresser of tin plates


and leave the space beneath the roof


for the waking dream
of a world beyond
mists, hills and trees



through an ochre-crusted eye.