Pause

I have hung my lute on the wall
And tied it with a green ribbon
I don’t sing my songs any more;
my heart is so full that I can’t find the words.
Once my longing and loneliness poured out in song
But now my joy is so great that no sound can contain it.

Now rest here, my lute
And when the wind stirs your strings
I wonder, Is it the final echo of my songs
Or the prelude of more songs to come?

A paraphrase of a beautiful song from Schubert’s Die Schone Mullerin. And a rather appropriate description of why there have been so few posts over the last month or so…

Invitation

The path to intimacy
Is not through caressing
But through the mind

Overcoming hesitancy
Through confessing,
Letting stories unwind

Daring to abandon secrecy
Optimistically guessing
The hearer will be kind

Will you love what you see
in the candid undressing
of the curves of my mind?

A tribute

For your willingness to open a window into your lives
The clumsy humour of your personal descriptions
Recieve my thanks

For the places you led me I had never seen before
The jokes and stories you shared with me
Receive my thanks

For the courage of your honest wanting
The chivalrous generosity of your gifts
Receive my thanks

For the open tribute of your intent desire
The sweetness of your vulnerability
Receive my thanks

For your valiant navigation of what it is to be men
For your sincere approach to what is female in me
Receive, again and again, my thanks

meaning is optional

Below a synaesthete’s numeric rainbow
Daffodils thunder along the roads
Petulant stoats skittle sharply
Past a tigress, smoothing on suncream
And drooling lackadaisically into the dust
I jettison my heart and its whimpering satellite
And my forgotten core hollers with the joy
of metamorphosis

 

I really find it difficult to write poems that don’t make sense. Indeed I do tend to make my points a bit too explicitly, rather than gracefully (poetically?) allusive. So I found this week’s readwritepoem prompt to experiment with nonsense verse quite challenging.

I also drew on their wordle cloud prompt, and tried to jam together some surreal images… at every step trying to resist my mind’s tendency to try and make some sense out of it all.  It was surprisingly hard!

I wouldn’t claim the result has any particular artistic merit, but I’ve posted it as evidence of my struggle…  and because in the process I’ve learnt that a lot of my satisfaction in poeming comes from finding a pattern and making things fit together!

Mad grin

click to see uncropped image

I’m feeling a bit under pressure at work at present. I start a new job next week. Well, technically I start next week but over the last two days I’ve begun to be hit by some of the new challenges – all complex and requiring to be dealt with urgently from a point of very little knowledge. My predecessor is out of the country, my new boss is on leave, and her boss has only been in the job a fortnight. I have a good team but they’re under lots of pressure and I haven’t quite got straight what each of them does, so it makes it a bit tricky to work out who to ask. At least one of the challenges I’m dealing with happens less frequently than once in a blue moon in my organisation… and yet it comes along in my first week!

But the funny thing is that each time I come across a new problem to deal with, I find the crazy grin on my face has intensified by another degree. I find myself enjoying the absurdity of having to deal with all of this at once. Plus there’s a feeling that if I manage to do anything at all constructive in this situation, it’s surplus to reasonable expectations!

So the photo above taken a few months ago in a wildlife sanctuary, seems to capture the way I’m feeling just now – and possibly my facial expression too! I may wince a bit… but actually I do enjoy a challenge!

Spring in the air?

I’ve just signed up to contribute to the Spring Haiku 2009 blog, and have a haiku up there… do check out the site as something interesting seems to be stirring in the garden!

cold flame, dry potion

This is a follow-up to alchemy of flame:
…
…

coals of the firewalk red with paint
glass empty as the dry pool below the diving board 
labyrinth that’s just a paper set, for a play with no audience

all that remains, is an aching heart, its bravery wasted,
empty of the dreams that blazed
in its heartfelt fever

Eyes and heart

There is a deep, strong sweetness in a heart that’s open to all
A heart that loves without reserve, and sees no need for guile
Yet open hearts are easily hurt by those who mock and maul
Or batten on generosity that’s unpractised in tough denial
Until that deep, sweet openness is gone beyond recall
Leaving the sad heart frozen over, as eyes forget to smile

There is a deep, strong wisdom in eyes open to danger
Cautious from the memories of old wounds that have scarred
Like the restless sentinel stare of an always-watchful ranger
Aware of what might happen if she ever dropped her guard
Eyes that dare not look for kindness in the bright face of a stranger
Eyes that see so clearly, but, in fear, look far too hard

There is a middle way, I think, between suspicion and hoping
And that’s the path I seek to walk – with eyes and heart wide open

 

This sonnet takes as its starting point the ending words of Neil Gaiman’s amazing Graveyard Book.

“The midsummer sky was already beginning to lighten in the east. And that was the way that Bod began to walk, down the hill, towards the living people, and the city, and the dawn. There was a passport in his bag, money in his pocket. There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill. And there would be dangers in it, and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover. Mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard…. But between now and then, there was life, and Bod walked into it with his eyes, and his heart, wide open.”

I love these words – and indeed the whole book – and in reading the readwritepoem prompt to write a “bop” based on a refrain from another poem, I couldn’t resist making use of these lines. In the end it worked better as a normal sonnet rather than a bop, so maybe I’ll have a go at bopping later.

alchemy of flame

lost in a labyrinth of mirrors
the lives I chose not to live
tease me with their gold-red glitter
and against their glazed silence
the cries of long-faded passion echo
suffering and joy indistinguishable

where is the thread to guide me?

I have been seeking that tantric alchemy
that transforms the bitter almond tang
of old love’s pain into rich bright mead
now the drink simmers before me
its scent brims with sweet intoxication
saying wisdom has tempered the poison

does temptation cloud my seeing?

in the crucible metal shivers and curdles
before melting in consummation
to be shaped by the whim of the vessel
into which it once chose to throw itself
the first hot breath of that forging
traces my skin with sensual intent

should I give myself to the fire?

This started with a readwritepoem prompt about other lives… and took off in an unexpected direction.

The photo is Goblet of cognac, originally uploaded by Andrejs Jegorovs.

transformation

In my dreams I heard the silent incantation
tumbling through the orange night
woke to find seven inches of magic
wrapping my hard-bitten street
like a belated Christmas present
the gleam of broken syringes
transmuted into the glitter of snow
wool-snuggled, I go searching for a lonely faun
to invite back home for tea and toast.

This is a jigsaw poem, drawing on 10 words supplied by various poetswhoblog contributors, specifically:  seven, hard, bite, belated, gleam, broken, syringe, snow, lone, toast. I’ve tried to capture the amazing feeling of a recent day of deep snow, which completely transformed my street.