Fruit Tree

Inward, outward.
Each branch homeward striving,
by grace of truth reviving,
toward the same forgotten source
of love beyond the leaf.

Sublime pathos, sacred meaning,
within the blossom mouth,
voluptuous season kiss.

On knees of praise
now and then you see it:
wholeness, central stillness,
held in awesome breath:

Eternity.
Music of the seed;
fullness,
fruitful brimming,
outward from that inner force.

August: 1998

Waterlilies
(in memory of Claude Monet  1840-1926)

Beneath the fragile pads a shape, beckoned
by shadow, pure by definition: light,
within a rippled stream of complex flight,
moving on the passing point of burning second.

Flashed by colours eye once marked and reckoned,
slow fading force combined with creeping night
and lost forever slides from darkened sight;
the heart consumes, even as the soul is quickened.

Struggle and grief find will to persevere,
so loss endured has finally endeared

you, here to Giverny, to science past,
mon frère. In placid depths your laboured years
spent fashioning, in coloured swirls of tears
distilled of passion, find your hard won truth at last.

April: 2007

Note: Rhyme scheme: abba abba cc dccd - a French sonnet in iambic pentameter, featuring alexandrine (iambic hexameter) closures to each quartet. 

Trois Cinquaining

Watching
petals curling;
there seems no easy way,
nor does the passage of seasons
relent.

Hearing
light rains falling;
there was no beginning,
nor do Spring's birds have memory
of it.

Waiting,
a tear welling.
You have no word of me,
nor do I expect to see you
again.

March: 2007

Journey to the Blessed Isles

My themes were known to me by birth, not age impressed
nor worn with hard-earned care; such thoughts must surely die
through wealth or fame, not seek the light a lonely heart knows best.
My selfish needs are satiated thus I soon shall fly
as babel fish or bird, to drop at Heaven's gate and rest
there, ponder on the meaning so enscribed
in earthly beauty's golden bough and sacred vine,
and drink of what Eternity is mine.

The present age has left me lost and staring at the view
such scarecrow arms these tattered threads had cast upon,
the life-long innocence my Father's blinded eyes once knew
beyond his wind's farewell, in journey on to Avalon.
Tumultuous thoughts in full, of bird and tree, those loving few
who found my heart, my animals and every season's song.
With Nature's conch I listen for the sound of ancient sea
and in my Mother's heart I hear the whispering sidhe.

Freedom leaves its stones unturned, takes no false hope
from carnal love beyond its winged desire; in re-creation of all this
old age holds victory over supple bone, and veins no longer cope
with empty flesh, reduce to dust whatever sense once made of bliss.
Instead I weave, with verse and word, the strands of an immortal rope
to coil around your heart and bind my thoughts in mist
to keep you wrapped; a bottle in a sea of wind and wave,
I take my foraged meaning to its early grave.

Whatever force death sends I welcome and accept
to put a stop to breath, to sage and wise imagining.
Drink not the salty tears whereon your cheeks my eyes have wept;
look to the West, my love and find yourself a dress of selkie skin,
made from a distant dream through which we all have slept,
discarded from the hurt and pain we floundered in;
far from embittered hearts, the ragged age we look upon,
your wondrous sky, my faring sea, the journey on to Avalon.

April: 2006

Note: In Celtic shamanic tradition the 'Sidhe' are a noble and beautiful race of otherworldly shape-shifters who act as spirit guides for mankind. 'Selkie' are the seals inhabiting those waters off the North coast of Scotland, about the Orkadian and Hebridian Isles, the Blessed Isles, where my family is from. As legend has it, a mortal man may marry a female selkie after hiding her skin, so to find temporary happiness of a sort. But should she ever find it again, she will leave him and return to the sea. 

Photograph

Your smile contains some hint of loss, 
a backward glancing over wasted years,
taking air in, breathing softly, 
at the still point of perfect stasis
between taking control of my starlit traces 
and you enveloping. Here, 
where second-hands move ever so slightly backwards, 
we forever lead our lives. 

I am ocean upon you, 
fluid cocooning of your earthly curvatures;
I dream of all that will ever be, 
in that split-second of future 
wherein we can never forget our past.

Held by the sum of these subtractions 
I am startled awake,
fast losing track of the night's brief fadings,
blood no longer flowing freely in my veins.
My darwinian skimmings hide the evidential flaw,
your picture marks its space, 
a mantled face beneath senility's ignore.

In that crowded place where we first rubbed thresholds, 
on the spine of our mutual conspire,
enlivened by the no-longer-lit shadows 
of our never-to-be pyre, 
I will remember you.

You are, we were, by seed and history, twice reborn,
conforming to both wing and core of temporal fire,
surrendered to a destiny pre-sworn and love, 
a fortress breached by enemy desire.
The fate to which we both so eagerly conspired 
was written long before our age,
engendered in the shudder of its ire, 
transmitted gene to gene, from page to page;

through circumstance our ordinary lives became 
a photograph, reminding of a past pre-played,
that future hearts may be so rendered deaf and dumb 
and by sheer chemistry beautifully portrayed.

February: 2007