To lose your language is to lose your dignity and your muse.
It’s to lose the power of self-expression and to frustrate the longing soul that flutters like a butterfly striving to reach for the beauty of light yet frustrated by the weight of its now useless wings unable to rise.
So much the soul sees at night, wandering in dreams among the stars. Memories of former rooms where the old inhabitants still dwell, shadows among the shadows, some still gifted with limited powers of speech, but others, tongue-tied and silent, and our chatter reduced to a net of butterfly buzz words.
Oh for the freedom of flight, for the liberty of my language found anew and capable still of shaping and recreating the world of silence in which I now live.
Based on a Welsh Poem by Harri Webb Colli iaith a cholli urddas.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive.”
But who are we deceiving, us or them, ourselves for believing our own propaganda or them for being deceived by what they hear?
Propaganda, properly goosed, and the goose wrung by its neck and strung up to dry before we pluck it, season it, and cook it in its own grease for a heavy Christmas dinner so much cheaper than a chicken or a turkey, unless we breed them ourselves.
Or would you rather duck? What’s that flying over there? I don’t know. Here comes another one. Flying low. “Duck!”
Or, as the duck said at Christmas: “Peace on earth: but put an end to peas, please.”
It’s a lonely walk round the animal park, the petting zoo with its animated young, goats, sheep, llamas, alpacas, all of them greedy and alert, ears pricked, eyes open, munching away, hand-fed by the visitors.
Only the wind moves the swings today. We walk in silence, but don’t stay long. That little body that swung the swings, those little feet that raced from place to place at such a bewildering pace…
they are not here. We watched them board the plane, fly up into the sky, head west and home, and now we, the old folk, abandoned, hold hands, and walk alone.
I had no paper with me in the car and wrote this on a bottle redemption slip.
Redemption: that’s what I seek and some days it seeks me. A double need this need to redeem and be redeemed. A double need too this god I need, the god who needs me.
Lonely he will be without me, and I without him. Knock and the door will open. Seek and ye shall find.
I look and, yes, he’s there, him within me and me within him.
This redemption slip is all I need: empty bottles on the one hand, my empty heart on the other, both now redeemed.
All of this while I sit in the car. outside Wendy’s or outside Taco Bell, sitting quite still and ready to wait, not knowing my upcoming fate.
Words grow like flowers, invasive, cruel, beautiful, cutting, and when cut, they wither and fade, just like flowers. Catch them while you can, I say. Catch them, hold them tight, press them to you heart, for time is voracious and will soon devour them, swallowing them down in the black holes of forgetfulness, carelessness, and memory loss. Shine a light on your words. Underline them, grace them with stars, think about them, carefully. And remember, the word once spoken or written can never, ever be recalled.
Joy of Light
I wait for words to descend, soft, peaceful. They brush my mind with the soft touch of a grey jay’s wings. When they refuse to come, I know that silence is golden. Sunshine spreads its early morning light, upwards, under the blinds, into my room and my eyelashes radiate its rainbow.
Light from the rose window in Chartres once spread its spectrum over my hands, and I rejoiced in the glory of its speckled glow. I spread my fingers before my face and marveled at the suit of lights clothing my body. In such splendour mortal things like words cease to flow.
Words are inadequate. They cannot express what I feel when I breathe in color and light and my heart expands into an everlasting rose, as red as dawn, as bright as a blushing sunrise over Minister’s Island. Flowers burst into bloom. A sense of immanent beauty fills me as light, and warmth, and joy disperse night’s gloom.
Sometimes the yearning heart wraps itself in a cloud of unknowing. Then come doubts and fears and a sense of being alone and abandoned, adrift on a rising sea, with night drawing nigh and no horizon in sight.
But, at the centre of that cloud that aching heart still thirsts for cool water to soothe and cure the ills of an internal world that seeks a lighthouse on a shore yet finally finds that light within itself, and then is safe, and lost no more.
The hollyhocks are back. A little bit late, but just starting to reveal themselves in all their glory. It’s been a strange spring, with frost warnings (and two actual frosts) in June, heavy rain, T-Storms, a tornado watch, extra hot days and, thankfully cold nights with the temperatures at +4C, even this month, July.
The yucca plant is flowering again, with three flourishing stems this time. It only started to flower late last week, but it, too, is full of promise. Somehow, while there are flowers, there is still some hope, some beauty, and some time and space for rejoicing.
Ah, daffodils, my favourite flowers.
Daffodils
Winter’s chill lingers well into spring. I buy daffodils to encourage the sun to return and shine in the kitchen. Tight-clenched fists their buds, they sit on the table and I wait for them to open.
For ten long days the daffodils endured, bringing to vase and breakfast- table stored up sunshine and the silky softness of their golden gift.
Their scent grew stronger as they gathered strength from the sugar we placed in their water, but now they have withered and their day is done.
Dry and shriveled they stand paper- thin and brown, crisp to the touch. They hang their heads as their time runs out and death weighs them down.
Vis brevis, ars longa – life is short but art endures. Maybe my daffodils will last longer than the yucca and the hollyhocks. They will certainly outlive this year’s bloom. Time and tide wait for no man, and flowers too are subject to the waxing and the waning of the moon. That’s life, I guess. Long may it last.
rogermoorepoet 