This poem is not easy to explain, so I won't try other than to tell you that 'shooting bunnies' was a term used by a group of public schoolgirls to describe farting. There were other things than that in my mind though. If anybody really wants to know more, please ask and I will try to unravel my thoughts

Alone in the Garden

From Eden to Gethsemene,
and weedy lawn beneath my feet.
The serpentine seducer works on now.
There's knowledge deep inside those plants,
to eat and learn what's bad. But,
However bad the pain in your stomach,
the angles of a triangle
still add up to 180 degrees.

Consuming passion
soaks through the senses,
and anaesthetises awareness
of a disjointed world.

I was riding my bicycle
when the craft landed.
They took me and did surgery on my knees.

Three small girls in neat, grey pleats, were
shooting bunnies as they chatted and giggled.
They talked of the siamese twins
created in the damp spots on the sun.

There is a time machine in every quark.
But show me the universal nematode who made
the knotted wormholes in space.

Oh Mary Quantum, leap into my consciousness
and show me a particle of understanding.
Who is my universal saviour?

"Fifty stone man into gloves
and indoor cycling
seeks similar.
No freaks."

When the gardener appears
and calls 'Mary',
your first gasp of recognition
evaporates with the spirits
of all lost friends. You are
alone in the garden.

I do enjoy your confounding imagery! The UFOs/Jesus conflation -- the healing always administered by someone/thing extraneous, unworldly -- the removal of a person to facilitate healing/ the suspension of disbelief to facilitate credulity; the first person account of a miracle -- always suspect, always shifting into variations or the retelling replacing the memory -- as in religion. The siamese twins born in the damp patches on the sun -- lucifer fallen -- the soul besmirched? Sun spot activity, cyclical: statistically, heightened sun spot activity always accompanies increased numbers of thrombosis casualties... just guessing at this being a platonic completeness: ie the siamese twins born 'whole' in a Platonic sense? The sun eclipsed by the moon - visual damp patches, damp patches by connotation moon/sea -- the willingness to create myths (did you have a mouldy orange in your fruit bowl at the time of writing?). The schoolgirls as a closed order/circuit offering a representational neatness. I guess 'Alone in the Garden' is prelapsarian Adam? Or God now that humans have been banished until proven/reprieved through mortality, and the archetypal 'Seeker' (not quidditch) never finding Another. I find certain parts intrusive -- it's like two poems (a siamesing of poems?) in search of each other -- a coda/balance to the other: two antithetical strands -- oh dear wombats -- now I'm getting double helix DNA -- the incomplete separation of ----
Sophie's going to hate me for this.

Hello Sophie, crickey, don't worry -- I speak in Torrent Mangalese and scare myself with where I've ended up after reading something. But I'd hate to be the one who put you off someone else's poem, that would be doing both you and the poet a measure of disservice that would have the Authority confiscating my alphabet! Thank you for saying such lovely things, though. Yes, thank you for that.

Thanks as ever Moxy. I am fascinated, and frankly amazed, at how much of what was in my head in writing the poem you have drawn from it. The care and depth with which you read and think about what you have read is extremely impressive.

I agree very much with Sophie (I wonder if she is the Sophie in Sophie's World finding her way to philosophical truth with the help of all those little pieces of paper?) that your analysis of the poem is itself poetic. Of course you found more in the poem than I consciously put in it although the overall theme is spot on.

The story which grows in retelling replaces memory and becomes its own reality. In this way religions, received wisdoms and political parameters are often developed.

The sunspot cycle and its correlation with a number of earthly and human occurrences is used as a metaphor for the usually unconscious associations which we make in our minds between events that may or may not be genuinely related. For example, the obvious truth that eating ice cream gives you a suntan as we can tell from the fact that at times of higher ice cream sales, more peole show lots of nicely tanned skin. Again, this kind of crypto scientific mental process gives rise to or reinforces beliefs in supernatural events.

The lonely hearts ad seeks to demonstrate that one person's normality is anothers madness or weirdness.

Alone in the garden at the end is humanity alone without God, having to create ones own meaning and purpose from life rather than having it handed down from a magical source. The miracles that we observe are illusions distracting us from the task of understanding the laws and rules that we believe to have been broken by the miracle.

Thank you for giving time to my obscure writing.

Actually I missed out quite a lot there. You mentioned, Moxy, an antithetical element, possibly two conflicting, or at least separate themes. This is owed to the long rejected Marxism of my youth in which dialectics were so important.

What I was doing was setting the neat well ordered lives of the girls, apparently amusing themselves trivially, with the great profundity of issues that they were actually considering in terms of cosmic influences on humanity.

The intention was that the polar opposites in the work synthesise at the end in self realisation. I don't suppose I actually achieved that, or that I could achieve it.

A long time ago I approached the issue of my interest in religious (or more accurately anti religious) ideas in a completely different way in which I satirised catholic liturgy with faux latin language while trying to challenge some of the central tenets. I will post that now.

Sorry Sophie. It was a novel written by Jostein Gaarder and published about ten years ago. Sophie is led through the works of the great philosophers by mysterious letters which have a Norwegian postmark.

It's a good book. No wind up.