Sitting on the step at the bathroom door, in shoeless heat, I write a poem about faraway snow.
Quinn is Neptune in a bath full of plastic dinosaurs. He is roaring and administering Great Outpourings from his Great Plastic Beaker. The dinosaurs are helplessly washed this way and that in stricken groups, their faces frozen in plastic terror-grimaces.
I can hear Bang making lego robots at the kitchen table. They address one another with drummed-in politeness and express tender concern about one another’s leprous lego wounds.
If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs.
As I scribble in my notebook, I try on the meanings of dreft-laden land, my feet bare in the bathroom heat. The still, ashen scene is livened by roars and robot-relations.
If you can keep your head.
In this moment, I feel intensely rich, flooded by a hyper-colour feeling of home. I am running, untethered through a thought-scape; I am sitting with my children. My mummy-being a bounty of gravity that allows my little satellites in held-orbits, to find their heads, even as I keep my own.
Hannah Stoney is a British artist and writer.