A Poem for July, a Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

A BOAT BENEATH A SUNNY SKY

Lewis Carroll

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43907/a-boat-beneath-a-sunny-sky

This poem has such a haunting quality. And I too was a child who was entranced by the Alice books - they helped to influence my own writing.

This is a quote from a review of "Till They Dropped" on my Amazon page:  A very dark Alice in Wonderland reimagined through a dystopian lens of corporate greed, consumerism, killer robots, and out-of-control technology. Intelligent literature for grown-ups - highly recommended!

I hope my writing has something of the beauty and power of Lewis Carroll's - just something.  And I hope I have created a world as believably as he did in the Alice books.  Or almost.  I am not the writer he was, but I would love to be.

And aren't we, the damaged children of disobedient Adam, as insubstantial as a dream?  We, who were supposed to be perfect and living, are dying from the moment we are born.  Our lives are over before we know it - even if we make our threescore years and ten.  Given my age, I am thinking about this rather a lot.

And one day I hope we will all, right here on this lovely earth, know what it is to be living, not dying. I doubt we can imagine the happiness of it.  And of course I hope that Lewis Carroll and Alice and her siblings will be there too.

Till They Dropped also appears in my short story collection The Umbrellas of Hamelin, a collection of stories I wrote over many years.

It has been sunny - but I have been so full of this cold I have actually felt a bit shivery.  I feel like Vera in the Giles cartoons of old, all bundled up on the beach among the sunbathers.  My field service group is doing hall cleaning and hospitality this month, so I did stay on to help a bit with the clearing up, and volunteered for tea and coffee service next Sunday.

I have some medical stuff coming up, we have an invite to a BBQ on Saturday, and an invite to do a couple of return visits with some siblings also on Saturday. If I can only get rid of this cold...