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The forgetfulness of being

The forgetfulness of being

Beneath the skin,
the drapery and decorations,
we are all the same, they say,
all have drunk from the same source,
swum the same amniotic sea,

but why do some forget the tenderness of its touch,
the fingers’ brush so soft,
the whispered words of the waves
that fill every tree that has leaves to speak?

The meadow lies silent in the heat, and no birds sing.
In this silence so much is forgotten,
but your eyes have never changed,
nor your step that parts the faceless crowd,
and I remember that we are not all the same.

The Darkest Tide

I did visit the Oracle today, and she gave me a poem. I’ll post it tomorrow, as today I want to make an announcement. The Darkest Tide, first book of a mythological fantasy trilogy is available for pre-order! I’ve waited a long time for this, and Northodox Press have done a splendid job with the cover. Publication date is September 18, but if you order it now, you’ll get a sale price reduction.

Here is the link to the publisher’s website with the details.

In the land of the blind, a one-eyed girl must lead.

In a broken world that has forgotten its name, everyone has a secret. Una One-Eye sees with the eye that isn’t there, but the fishmen overlords must never know or they will kill her. Una’s mother knows how her child lost her eye and why. That is her deadly secret. Fiachra, Haldan Red-Hair’s thrall, is more than a slave. He sees the sapphire fire in Una’s empty orbit, but he keeps that to himself. Somewhere, a power is hidden that can destroy the tyranny of the fishmen and rebuild the drowned world of Ys. But where and how is a secret.

Lifetimes

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.

What I never knew

What I never knew

I never knew those times of donkeys and turf smoke,
The smell of corduroy wet in the rain,
mornings of such pale green and the stone walls grey in the half-light.

I never knew those times of silence in sunken lanes,
only the clipping of hoof-beats and larks rising.

I was not born when those times were grown rare,
and the poets were writing their longing for home
sitting where the sea meets the shore,
and only the eye and the heart travel across the divide.

I never knew those times, but my grandparents did,
and who are we but shoots of the old tree,
scions of the sod that birthed us all?

Night fishing

The Oracle gave me a handful of words that made an instant poem.

Night fishing

I went fishing for stars in the ferocity of the night,
searching for the sacred in the softness of the sky,

but there was no pool where brown trout slept,
no skim of shifting reflections beneath weeping hazels,

only an empty universe, rushing away from my questing hands,
the hurtle of bright pinpricks, no more than laughing gas.

Fading away

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.

Blue as dreaming

I have only just had time to visit the Oracle, and I’m drugged up to the eyeballs with pain-killers for another stupid pulled back muscle. Weeding yellow avens, tough, deep-rooted, tenacious beggars. The Oracle has given me an appropriately off-my-head sort of a poem, with a nod and a wink to Paolo Conte.

Blue as dreaming

Blue, he said, listening to the rain,
blue and far away,
not knowing how else to reply.

I painted my canvases,
blue and far away,
my islands of dreams,
asked nothing that required an answer.

He listened to the rain,
while the wind blew them away,
islands and dreams.

Far away, the islands lie,
cloaked in mist,
blue as a dream,

and when he dips a brush in the sea,
it drips sadness,
round as moons,
as eyes filled with tears.

He came looking for a woman
and found only me,

the brush I held,
golden as laughter and yellow suns,
red as the tip of my tongue.

The brevity of happiness

The brevity of happiness

Eggs hatch, nestlings,
and death fledges
from the first instants.

Feathered life is short,
a breath on the wind,
a wing shadow plunging,
furred agility balancing.

But such a life, canopied
by the sky and blowing leaves,
behind the palisade woven
with love by parents’ beaks,
this womb of the spring world,
greening to balmy summer,
is perhaps as sweet in its brevity
as our lingering, in fume-filled boxes,
screeching with the voices
of a million million machines.

Morning meadow with pheasants

As I was staring at the Oracle’s words, wondering how to make sense of them, one of the pheasants started cough-crowing outside. Suddenly I knew what they meant.

Morning meadow with pheasants

The morning cries out to me
with the voice of the pheasant,
the great glossy jungle fowl,

and I wonder how they last through the night,
the chicks in the nest, when fox and weasel prowl,
and the long grass hides nothing from gimlet eyes.

The sky looks down, and I look
for the fabled haloed beneficence,
the sun-smile of protecting motherly arms,

see only gnarled, cold fingers that refuse to die,
teeth that glitter in the dark, hear the pulsing
steel pump in the chest that never slows.

We are all chicks, downy and wingless,
the darkness full of gimlet eyes and insatiable bellies.

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