The moon,
a thumbprint on a stainless steel sky,
and the world spins on his fingertip.
A chandelier of stars hangs above
the coal tip, this is where night hides,
when daylight returns.
But he sees beyond the furthest star,
where the headstones of forgotten worlds
lie buried under the oceans of melted ice.
There are no threats to his safe place,
his imagination’s bubble is a universe
known only to him.
His journey began before birth,
where night’s shadows held him captive.
And now, even with closed eyes,
there are no dark places.
His young mind is not yet programmed
to ignore the integrity of what he sees.
Now, the child has become a man,
telling his children of the magic of a night sky.
But their imagination will struggle to journey
above the sky’s dustbin.
Here, is the moon that was night’s companion,
and here, is a clarity of stars that shine unseen.
Rowland Hughes is a Welsh writer and poet. He was born, and lived until his late teens, in the Rhondda Valley, from where he still draws most of his inspiration. He worked as a Master Decorator and studied trades in the construction industry. He later became a Local Authority Assistant Surveyor. Due to ill health, he retired in 1997. In 1998, he joined a Cardiff University Creative Writing Group. He loves to observe people, places and nature, writing in bustling cafés and the confines of his writing shed.
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The discussion of the word “integrity” in Rowland’s wonderful work brings to mind one of the best definitions of a poem I have heard: word-thing. Unlike prose, in a poem each individual word matters, and by implication the ones consciously or subconsciously left out matter, too. It is an amazing process, is it not?
The same scene is seen from different times in the speaker's life. The much later view has lost all its early enchantment, the speaker having been "programmed" to "ignore" its "integrity."
(Experience could teach one to deny it all integrity, if that word is understood to signify good character, I should mention.)
If the speaker uses "integrity" only to refer to the general unification of his surrounds, no moral point is being made.
So my guess is that life's heaped-up burdens have blinded him to the surrounding scenery.
(Some learn to ignore the scene's integrity simply by realizing it has none--in the moral sense. To say that again in a different way.)
The speaker must still be aware of the scene's "integrity" since one can't ignore something that isn't present to the senses, because there'd be nothing to ignore.
So my guess is that the meaning is that while everything around is still there and still has all its "charms," the older speaker simply can't enjoy them, due to personal circumstances, labor, worry, dull routine and whatever else.
Integrity is the word that caught my interest most, thus all my attention went to it.