Category: Poetry

2016. / Rise.

Lucy

A place of fleeting shallows,

of waters rising roughly with the tides,

and shortly draining all away.

Where notions rise as bottles on a pollute sea,

and are tossed about on wavelengths,

let loose upon the noisy air,

to fall again, silent, into the water.

A time of rising disbelief,

leaving warships of old glory-stripped,

their hulls bored through beneath our vision,

to sink under their mutiny.

When a whispered word means more

than a thousand voices pounding on the sky

in thunderclaps of protest.

A world of red-lit nights,

the falling sun casting colours on the sea,

and making shadows for their working.

Where lightening rises from the ground,

to spread its violence to the cloud,

pierces through, and the rain brought tumbling

tastes of acid on the tongue.

A time of desperate villains, desperate men,

whose desperation breeds contempt for laws of nature,

and plants the seeds of lies, to rise

as lofty trees, fed pesticides and time.

When calls for justice are lost into the air,

made quiet in the rising roar, the winds,

and in the winds the voices melt,

and all hands are lost at sea.

Being in Float.

Lucy

driftwood

left stranded

then dampened by the tide

caught

by rising waters

and wrested from the shore

flotsam

and now floating

and buoyed by gentle waves

drifting

on the surface

just above the undertow

eddied

drawn in circles

and deftly swept away

stranded

by the currents

on the shoreline once again

Garden.

Lucy

We wove some magic here.

Deckled trees with fairy dust—

the figments of our imaginations drew lines

between the sky

between the leaves

between the earth.

A white butterfly

—wandered, onward, captain of our fairy band—

buffeted by the breeze

took flight

and glittered flicking wings

into the sunlight.

He was like our memory

—allied and squandered to the air—

a captain captive to the passing currents

at rest on tides of drifting listlessness

buoyed on waves of sound—loud

reverbed from the earth itself

and beneath the ground dispersed to nothing but vibrations.

Caws of magpie on the branches of trees

beyond the fence-lines

called insistent, echoed

and, in flight, drew ever more away.

We left a fish adrift on the wall

—light-flicker, silver scales in the sun—

to tinker with our senses

breaking beams against one another in refraction

into parts.

We played colour against cousin

and deployed in every gesture of design

a symmetry of power in all things that’s mirrored

in perfection

by the most broken shook-up thoughts of early morning

when night’s break seems to slumber

beyond the restless sleepless soul.

Little carrions of life

—bearing sunshine as they went

light caught white upon their tiny wings—

darted, tumbled, climbed and flew

their circus one of circles through the sky

an endless repetition of their patterns

that went on gently till the nightfall.

We saw every tiny thing alight

—their edges made their edges

and at once made melting edge-to-edge—

their glimmered rims glimpsed through lashes

looked-at sideways

caught in sketches from the doorways

of the moments

only half-here and half-now.

Sky-shimmers, the lineaments

copied in colour to our files and stored in footloose memory

to make the fodder of our dreams

when distorted

cards shuffled

and re-drawn upon the pages of imagination sleeping.

 

We weave some magic here

sleeping awake

in day-dreaming

in slow reading

of the air.

Lift Me Up.

Lucy

wash me clear

lay me down

and again lift me up

let the knots loosen

and the focus drift

let the seas rise and fall

and feel the rhythm shift

take notice

of the moments

as each one passes by

and re-listen

to the glisten

of a one-time audible smile