poetryspeaksong

i come with tales

of beautiful night, hearing, not seeing –

feeling the nearness of unseen creatures,

footsteps in the leaves … an owl calls,

a tree creaks in the dark, foxes bark,

a cobweb brushes your face.

to walk in the dark unseen to yourself,

everything’s changed, all you know turns strange,

a time of magic, flames flicker on faces

you thought familiar, streets transform.

there’s dancing somewhere – in the sky?

under the earth? all around invisible dancers

whirl to the music of night.

become one with the dark,

dance with darkness and candle flames,

love shadows, melt into them, this is the wild …

and the stars, the stars, they are the ones

we return to – the bear and the chair,

the warrior’s dream sword, cloudy with galaxies,

the wandering planets and their circling moons,

turbulent, collapsing suns

and the star-spattered outflung arm of this galaxy

reaching back into time, back to the source,

and on to new beginnings.

For ‘celebrate the night’ 19^th November, Knighton, Powys, Wales

This pair stands apart

from the golden-shoed imposters,

professional partners, ex competition dancers,

redolent of net and sequins.

She’s in a white dress, hair scraped back,

he suited impeccably in cream.

Their concentration is complete,

and now the ritual music can begin.

The dance they dance was called obscene,

pressing such sensuality into a pause

that no-one could mistake it.

They stop as if trying to remember,

each with a head turn, one and then the other –

or is it to forget, eyes never meeting –

the abandon of that previous moment,

when they became one being in total union,

frenzy fined into a formal gesture.

Supple ferocity takes over now;

they glide like jaguars, her simple dress,

taken by surprise at sudden movements,

follows more slowly with its skirt.

The dance allows each dancer to reveal

an essence of what each partly is

in life’s complexity,

eternal representatives;

the two become one, the one, two,

in figures of fusion and division,

with all the tension of the human

this tea dance time,

this Thursday afternoon, to records.

I will refuse
to come down from the mountain,
nor will I bother any more
with speech or writing, but will roar
and sharpen my claws
in the last of the forests.

he has always farmed here,

coaxing food from the dry salt earth

walking the beach with his mule and dogs.

now his once deserted beach has sprouted sunbeds,

strangers invade his little space, he finds their leavings.

at odds with this noisy alien world

that has no time for him or what he knows,

he finds life’s landmarks fading, his mind’s moorings vanish

swept away by a new tide he rails against.

“i used to harvest respect and honour, now contempt.

once coaxing fruit from the dry soil was prized.

now you sneer at me because my hands are earthy,

stained with the source of life.

don’t write my epitaph too soon, citydweller.

there may come a time when you come begging to us,

you who know nothing, who produce no food.

when that day comes, will i be there to give

as i have always done? bury me here by the sea!

i’ll never give in, except to death.”

Here are few waymarks,

old time, new time, time pressing through,

water wears out stone,

earth eats bone,

rich food for deep down

where roots reach;

this is the track that leads back,

up and along the crest, against the sky

where the huge clouds brush over,

back to the trackless.

Here you may be

a moving mark on a wide space, no more.

Lean on the wind and sun

let your shadow run

and follow on

to where one space rubs its back on another,

and the tors are scratching posts for clouds

that trundle over where the buckled rocks once melted and flowed

and the waves they made froze and wear away to dust.

Here, butting my thought on feeding time

like a nuzzling calf, here

where the puddles are sky traps

to catch all its moods,

where the fine grass shivers

by the tumbled standing stones,

here I enter stone time,

travelling back to the primal fires

of mothering stars.

Buddleia burns purple incense, ragwort, bindweed,

put forth joy rampant.  Here in the cracked earth, rank beauty claims

its scrap of world, intent incarnate in sappy stems,

and bitter juices, rich nourishment! The green need

to grapple, to feed on light, to scatter seed, enflowers them;

let me learn from the dandelion, breaking anew

through the black tar, starbursts of new life.