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Poetry
...and perhaps you will discover that these things which lightened your days were not as bright as first imagined, but that the illusion had more conviction than the illumination, and in the dying light and disorientation the darkness passed each of your senses through the aperture of the new: the flesh; the structures; the worn artefacts of the world became a braille for your lovely hands.
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bySunday, September 19, 2021There was once a poem so long that it stretched from the heart of the interior all the way to the coast. It was an important work, an epic that spun histories of an ancient and mystical people. But being a poem, it had no cash for a fare home, so took up living on some rocks beyond a breakwater. It survived on kelp and mackerel, and shaved with the sharp edge of oyster shells. When asked why it didn’t sort its life out, the poem used to shout that it was complete as soon as it was born, what else was there that it needed to be? As with all things that cannot change, people soon lost interest in the poem, and the world continued to turn. Every now and again skylarking kids or drunk adults would come to throw rocks at it. Lonely as an old grey bone, the poem would curl up among the tide pools in the night, breaking itself with riddles, trying to understand why saltwater didn’t cure everything, as promised.
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byWednesday, September 30, 2020You who turn from love in pain, turn gently: heed the softer counsels of the world. As a slender branch whips back from the weight of so many ravens; as the tulip wilts for moisture in the heat to stand once more within the glistening dew, rejuvenation whispers, as subtle as the snowflakes meagre shadow. You who turn from love in pain, turn kindly: seek the tender cycles of the world. The winter greets with joy-flung arms the first fog’s slow return, and so the moon shall know its lover’s face, the sun sinks without quarrel. Spring dances without clothes as Autumn looks on, waiting, and neither will depart the grand design. You who turn from love in pain, turn slowly: nothing exists but purpose, and the born to love must love although the season’s on the wane, just as the quiet swan floats upon the lake and the heron wades the shallows, though the fickle water’s edge subsides, and rises and recedes.
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byMonday, September 28, 2020Because you exist, I cannot see the world. You leap from lilacs, and tambourines, and bubble in the eddying waters. You plucked me from the stalk of a limp night, and because you exist I am suffocated by your name. I can’t see the world for the clutch you gave, or the fierce wind of your gasp. Your hands and their magic tricks; the stabbing light of your eyes. You jump from canyons, and you grow in the orchards, only to rise from the shadows of billboards and churchyards. Leaves tremble with the ever-floating note of your sung farewell. Somewhere else, you are being loved. Somewhere else. I am suffocated by your name. Because you exist I can’t see the world, or the lost coast of my homeland: the map of your body, pulsing with the beacon of a signalled misery. A mad voyager, I search for your hot imprint on the rock of each molten day.
