Tag: Franz Marc

I missed posting last week though I did consult the Oracle and did write a poem. We had one of the children staying for a few days, it was fierce hot, and I was struggling with a new round of line edits. I sent off the corrections yesterday (finally), so it’s time to catch up.

The dimming of the light

I hear an echo these summer days
in the swash of waves on the rocks below
the cool cave where she whispers her words.

I hear a weary faded colour
peach perhaps or old rose
like the pinched sinewy patterns in poplar bark.

We gave them warnings in the purple dawns
lava flowing electric green
plagues of tourists like the Northern Lights
the death of grass
the silent spring.

If they prefer their trash to the sight
of morning hares or moonlit hares
a meadow specked white and yellow
rain on new green leaves
the smell of the sea
new-cut hay
of a river flowing home
there is no hope.

Rain sighs into the sound of weeping.
Night falls.

Lifetimes

Blood is thick, sluggish,
reluctant to leave the home channel,
salmon-wise, returning to the source.

Do fish ache in their hearts
or does the great engine that pumps fins and gills
drive and drive onwards, mindlessly,
over obstacles and oceans, even into death?

We give in easier than the silvery fish,
stay where the living is softer
though the heart aches and aches.

We let the ship sail, wave it goodbye
through floods of tears that last a lifetime,
never understanding what is the one true god,
nor how to recognise its voice.

Fading away

The days have come of obscurity,
of sun too bright to see the shadows,
shadows too deep and black,

and the nightingales sing too loud, the nights,
to hear the small things rustling.

The grass has grown too high to see the meadow beneath,
the pink and white and yellow, cross-hatched with waving stalks,
and the sky is flat as a silver plate, a lake of shining steel.

There is too little that we see, perceive, in this tangle of things,
how this year’s nests are fewer than the last,
the fox no longer watches with her cubs at the meadow’s edge,
and we are silent now before the setting of suns.

The Oracle knows what has been waking me in the mornings.

Bird-music

The bird that drives the dream
fills the garden with beauty, pouring waves
of notes, oceans and seas, into tossing skies.

The bird that sings the song
drives the tides, that rock the ship
amid the waves, flying foam-feathers.

And in the spray of singing,
what wind will drive this water-music
with such wild joy?

A poem from the Oracle that didn’t want to stop.

Night and horse-wings

I

Sleep through windy nights, she says,
lying in strong arms.

Let the storm soar and swoop on fierce wings,
black waves beat about the ship,
clouds tear like raw wounds.

Take the purple not the red.

Leave your sorrows in the world that is passed
and find the seam where the gold lies,
the light and life of tomorrow.

II

I remember swimming in bitter water
while beauty ran like melted wax or fallen roses.

We worshiped false gods then,
the glitter in the shallows.

Our eyes full of sun, we said rain stings worse than salt,
but it was only the shadows beneath our eyes,
running like melted wax, fallen roses,

and we never saw the blue horses
that grazed between night and evening,
between purple and gold.

We haven’t seen any cranes yet though hundreds of them flew over Bordeaux yesterday. This afternoon though we saw the first geese, a small but very noisy skein. Excited to be going south obviously.

Geese

What is in the sky’s roar
but words hollow as empty jars?
They dart swift and insaisissable as swallows,
here today gone tomorrow.

I watch them take summer into the dark,
listen to the dark rising.

There’s a ship rusting beneath the polar ice,
beneath the clear, innocent blue,
and geese heading south
leaving all that behind them.

I am just a woman,
standing in the wind,
sighing for the spring, the garden,
and the hope flying.

A wish

Red summer was on me,
spread upon the green of spring
when nests were built,
eggs biding their time.

Then the chicks grew,
spread their wings
and flew into the mists of autumn,
mine not theirs.

The shots that ring
where the mists lie thickest,
and silent screams
(not theirs, please),
fill these last days with more death,
as if the cold will not claim enough.

Before we slip into the dark,
leafless and fog-damp,
I send out a wish
on pigeon-grey wings,
cloud and heron-grey,
early morning-grey wings,
that they, I, we
may reach another spring
beyond this coming winter.