Wordless Wednesday
Creativity
Coming Together
Coming Together
A coming together of cultures,
these three statues,
placed equidistant,
forming an equilateral triangle,
all things being equal.
Three founding cultures:
English, French, Indigenous,
in alphabetical order.
They stand face to face to face,
a triangulation,
silhouetted in profile,
sharing positive and negative space.
At the center of their union,
at the still point where nothing moves,
a living, breathing space,
that takes away your breath.
When you breathe again,
you take in air
and light and sun and
hope renewed.
Faith runs tingling round your body,
hand in hand with joy and life
and love reborn.
Jarea
Kingsbrae 25.1
25 June 2017
Jarea
This is a glimpse of
how it might be.
Surrounded by paintings,
snapshots and memories,
all we have ever done
hanging on the walls
as if we were visiting
a gallery of our lives.
Impressions from our childhood
line up beside
expressions of our adolescence
and
abstracts extracted
from our more mature years.
Time,
we are running out of time,
and our here and now is
a quality of deafness leading us
into the next dimension.
We will see our whole life,
in that blink of an eye.
Then there will be farewells,
a sudden silence,
and we will be gone.
Trinity
Kingsbrae 22.4
22 June 2017
Trinity
A coming together of cultures,
these three statues, placed
equidistant, an equilateral
triangle, all things being
equal and none more equal
than others; three brothers;
mother, father, child; father,
son, and holy ghost: no women
there; perhaps three founding
cultures: English, French, and
Indigenous, in alphabetical
order; and there they stand,
face to face to face,
a triangulation, in profile,
silhouetted, sharing positive
and negative space; and, at the dead
center of their union, at the spot
where all is still and nothing moves,
a living space, that takes away
your breath when you breathe
in air and light and sun and
a renewed hope; then faith runs
tingling round your body with
joy and life and love reborn.
Standing Stones
Kingsbrae 21.4
21 June 2017
Standing Stones
Standing in a stone circle,
surrounded by standing stones,
listening to their voices.
The reverberation of their uprooted rock
remembers its birthplace,
recalls the sculptor’s toil,
the polishing of granite and grain.
I’ll never forget those other stones:
bluestones at Stonehenge,
the Bronze Age tomb in Wick,
the toros de Guisando,
the danzantes at Monte Alban,
Hengistbury’s double-ditch and wall,
stone circles in Singleton
the Gorsedd ring in Caer Dydd.
Nor will I forget the deep-voiced
song of stone, here at the solstice,
standing in the middle
of three powerful granite statues,
their energies released
at this afternoon’s unveiling.
When I closed my eyes
I opened my mind and heart
to the deep earth-soul song
strummed in tune with the sunshine.
I breathed it in, retained it,
then allowed it to shine out
through the lantern of my heart.
Wollemi
Kingsbrae 21.3
21 June 2017
Wollemi Nobilis
To see you on this day,
the summer solstice,
when time and the sun
stand still,
is to recall you as relictus,
then to acclaim you
as Lazarus,
risen from the dead.
Your fossil footprints
walked for so long,
two hundred million years,
and you walked with them,
unknown, unrecognized,
lost in the wilderness.
What poverty in language:
we either describe you
in impossible scientific Latin
or else we reduce you
to a chocolate coco pops
breakfast cereal.
Hand-cuffed, chained,
your feet rooted within
this immobile crockery pot,
you will never leave us now.
You are your own solstice,
a stationary seed,
growing to adulthood,
sown in a circle
of never-ending time.
Comment: I have been trying since Sunday, 5 March 2017, to write this poem. But what are four months in the life of a seventy-three year old poet or a pine tree that was thought to have become extinct 200 million years ago. I do not have the words to express how I feel looking at this throwback to the time of the Dinosaurs. And maybe that is how this poem should start for it is, after all, Wordless Wednesday … “I do not have the words …” and thoughts, too, jam in the brain and refuse to cycle, let alone re-cycle. So, I’ll leave this poem for now. That said, I will probably come back to it. Meanwhile, do I ever feel so absolutely, totally, and completely inadequate.
Rain
Kingsbrae 20.4
20 June 2017
Rain
Hand in hand, we walk
beneath black umbrellas.
Grass beneath our feet is wet
and water seeps through
our shoes, soaking our socks.
Cold and numb in spite of the date
(the summer solstice draws near),
my ears strain against the pitter
-patter of falling rain to catch
the nearby robin’s song.
He has mislaid his voice
and I can no longer translate
his liquid notes into soul music
that might lighten mind and day.
Clouds gather and empty themselves
over our umbrella-covered heads.
In spite of damp and dark that rule,
thoughts abound and hop around,
like frogs in a summer pool, while
light bulbs explode in my brain.
Sometimes
Kingsbrae 20.3
20 June 2017
Some Times
Sometimes,
something happens:
lightning strikes the tree,
the upraised golf club,
the umbrella,
the baby’s stroller.
Maybe
an earthquake rocks the house,
or
hailstones as big as golf balls
shatter the greenhouse glass.
More often
it is as silent as frost on geraniums,
or clothes on the line quick-frozen in the wind.
Slow crumbling:
a breaking down by freeze and thaw,
free fall on the cliff face and the subsequent scree.
A cloud passes overhead:
our sunshine vanishes.
Water Tower
Kingsbrae 19.3
19 June 2017
Water Tower
(for Geoff)
Asked where he got the material
for his plays, Molière said:
“Je le prends où je le trouve,”
“I take it from wherever I find it.”
Here, before the water tower,
I find the tower to be a ground
level water tank, no tower at all.
The first steel band, the horizon,
is composed of yellow lilies.
Above them, the Kingsbrae Café shares
the second band with the gardens’ windmill.
Twin pointed roofs and the windmill’s
thin sails reach up to the skyline
with its background of trees
silhouetted against an egg-shell sky.
Art is in the eye of the beholder
or the artist and can be seen
wherever it can be found.
Insomnia
Kingsbrae 18.2
18 June 2017
Insomnia
When the gate-keeper sleeps,
who will open the gate?
Dreamland lies before us
but the gate is closed.
Where now is the gate-keeper?
How many sheep must we count
before the gate-keeper comes?
What will we do if he doesn’t arrive?
Must we just stand here and wait?
The sheep grow weary before our eyes.
They age and become frail.
Who now will count the motionless flock?
Where is the gate-keeper? Who will open
the gate that leads to the land of dreams?
Who will open the gate?
