The Sickle Heart

The sickle heart was the form of heart in the future.
It was disembodied.

Dad said not to touch it
in case it bonded with a whole human.

It lay in the bath looking more like a boomerang
or a bow than a sickle.
It was white and smooth and shone
as if wet.

I knew how it had got here.
I could fly.

I had to not think of what was below me
but of the other layer only I could see.

It was a pattern of shapes, colours and textures,
and if I tried to make sense of it
it didn’t move underneath me
and I fell to the actual ground.

What I saw that only I could see
was of course the real.
If I shut my eyes and focused entirely on it,
I travelled through time.

I had arrived from four hundred years
in the past.

I had flown faster and faster.
I had shut my eyes.

The real ground had raced past underneath me,
and when I had opened my eyes again,
I was here.

It had been hard adjusting.
But I had not been able to get back.

This was how the sickle heart
had come.