Under what weather
Do we seed our assurances
That love is ingrained?
A crop sown with forthright intention
And raised up of its own accord
To feed the masses
As if by rote
Under what weather
Do we seek shelter
In a sworn harvest
Bent on life
And suffused with the joy of being?
A graceless teeming
Of love ingrained
Consciousness seeks to nurture a deeper truth of being while the world wrestles confusion, tedium and opposing extremes.
Insides Out
From a precipice of reversals
I envisage realities stained by a confusion of tedium
I know only this: I am extant
Belly exposed – gnawed open by hunger for the interior
For a collusion of continuum that sees insides out
I am stable in my rudimentary way, but I reach…
I reach for the magma of understanding
Singeing my extremities
Vapourizing foundations
Reducing me to sediment
My core extracted
Gravitational lore exacted
On light of becoming
For me, this poem explores the relationship between language and the balance of power…how we use words to limit and oppress and the potential for something different. How much do we over-rely on words (even in our private thoughts) to the exclusion of a direct sensory experience of our world? If we rely more on our senses to process the world around us, might we begin to see something new? Can we begin to imagine a way of being human that does not encompass a sense of entitlement to power or a deficiency of power for anyone?
Power
When the wind
Takes the power
Of these words
And sweeps them away
Then, power will have elevated
Losing the burden of control –
Of naming
Of characterizing
Of categorizing –
Then, power will be ubiquitous
One thing I love about poetry is that any given poem has a different meaning for every reader. After I first published this poem, comments from readers reflected quite varied interpretations, none of which were similar to what the poem means to me as the writer. That is as it should be. In this case, however, I felt compelled to share the above process note about my own interpretation of “Power”.
I find the centre path
My eyes smouldering with exhaustion
I tell you I am here of my own accord
Then pluck my eyes out and retire
I am no more bound to the maelstrom
No more a rat in the labyrinth proving my worth
I have scattered my pennies
For their rat-tat-tat
On the glistening white floors
And danced to their rhythm
Until my soles bled
My red fortune spattered and spilt
I hand you the hilt
And plunge myself thus to eternity
If I pierce the fabric
We have staged a coup
And I am bound with you
Into the margins
When we open ourselves to the truth and power of nature and light, we are resolved to the same truth and power within ourselves.
Rendered
A sylvan dream requites our arrival
Permeating gold ablution washes over giants
Reaching us in strands
Vestiges of brilliance painting our skin
We are but miscreants and maladies
An opus dissonant and wistful
Resolved and replete by respiring light
We are sublimating, reintegrating
Syncopated selves dissipating fleet
Into amorphic jubilance rendered
When there is no view to the sea
I am reminded of the complexities and displacements
Shallows that engulf sentient beings
Leaving us stranded
With our monikers
For things we cannot name
Beveled edges bend the view
Until our eyes cannot attain clarity
Nor connect our own continuity to fluidity composed
But we embark on this odyssey
Unframed by expansion
And isn’t that the mandate of the universe?
Its sole prerogative
Amalgamations transcending
We are revoking and upending
What we’re meant to be
Mavericks waking cause to breach a higher sea
The story the sea told me
Lay open on the table
As I busied myself a perimeter around its truths
Always a wide berth
To protect my earthly longing
My trademark belonging
That makes me me
But not to the sea
To her, I am soluble
Like ink to water
Salt-scrubbed from pages
Happy to be free
To her, I am she
Washed ashore
I think of you
And the many times
You tried the landing
Echoing absences
Dot the shallows
Of what might have been for you
But for me,
I am here
Waterlogged and foreign
Time crawling out of my skin
And abandoning me to gravity
And as I become part of the landscape
I wonder now
What becomes of you?
This poem was originally inspired by a painting I admired while wandering through a summer farm and craft market. The artist, Isabel Gibson, was lovely and had many interesting stories of the coastal and pastoral settings depicted in her paintings. Nature inspires art, art inspires poetry, poetry inspires love, love inspires life…and we are cycled and recycled over and again.
Now…while there is still time…
while there are still words
Now…when we meet in passing and are in the same space
for the first time…and for the last
Lift your head, fair one,
for there is no tomorrow that will hold this…either the sweetness or the sorrow
Tomorrow will steal in on a breeze that blows beyond our knowing,
and you will turn around and all will be forgotten.
And glowing within you will be only the love and honour and truth of your original light
And if I live, it will be only in the life that I give to you…And I will say,
“it was mine to give, and thus I gave it”
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