Army of Silhouettes by Foy Timms

A castle of a boy stretches out into the darkness,
sits on a hill, transfixed. Held aloft by the shimmering 
night-freckles of stars. 
He tumbles through stupefied moss carpets of unrest,
watching his father thread a bearded pathway to peace,
across the sky.
And then his spiny grandfather encroaches, in close succession, 
shuffling along with eyes that once cared,
turning over in generational perspiration, sweating his words 
onto pavements.
And his once-resting grandmother twitches,
shakes her fist, interrupts ancestral chatter.
He watches age-old perforations coalesce 
around her soul’s endeavour 
to be heard, above a marriage with a mind of its own.
Inadvertently, his father steps out from unrememberedness,
bends away from this army of silhouettes, 
but a hallucination-cloak of grandfathers begins to grow,
grow outside of their coats
and grow beyond their voices,
from the brittle slatted windows in their pasts
into dense rich accents above sunrise.

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Foy Timms is a poet based in Reading, Berkshire, U.K. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Fevers Of The Mind Poetry Digest, Glove, Hypnopomp, Merak Magazine, North of Oxford, Peeking Cat Poetry and Pulp Poets Press, among others. She is preoccupied with themes such as fleeting connections, departure, solitude, British towns/villages, social exclusion and the sociopolitical dimensions of living spaces. Twitter: @FoyTimms