BEAUTY XV

The mystic sang of a faraway land 
where Beauty reigned,
beyond barricades of billowing clouds,
enclosed in wispy rainbow shrouds.
"There, the worthy bowed 
before Her throne, this coronate deity,
fair Selene, Nyx's brightest jewel,
poised atop Her starry diadem.
Would that I had the Sibyl's eye,
the sage's prowess of astral traversing,
I would scale endless miles of twilit skies, 
Her praises upon my lips, 
stars, my footholds, 
their rays, my ropes and harness,
to the summit of glamour and radiance,
where once I surrendered my dreams.
Upon a pyre of rebirth and restoring glow,
I would cast myself,
if so the goddess ordains, in Time's pool
behold my reflection,
my spirit's legacy seek in His abditory of
dreams abandoned.
Eternal servitude I would pledge anew 
to Nature's second soul,
my amarulence entombed in cold crystal
flames of the past, 
inscrutable, benevolent, cleaving the dark, 
consuming the unwholesome.
Her Light I would implore for my cuirass
and implement, thence to descend
Fate's path to my mortal journey.

© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: NIGHT AND HER DAUGHTER SLEEP

Source: www.pinterest.com

Artist: Mary Lizzie Macomber

BEAUTY XIV

A coralline climbing rose curved

o'er the hushed gap 

betwixt Summer's garden

and ceaseless, seasonless decay,

its heady scent spiralling

'cross greening walls and grey

into canescent, cortinate disarray. 

Clusters of clement cloudlets

showered their smiles

'pon this enclave life had forsaken,

blooms shimmering as

translucent pink gems Light engraved, 

obeying Nature's immutable law,

her sacred cycle.

Sumptuous blossoms fluttered,

as Zephyrus trailed

his airy fingers 'cross their satin petals,

these plucking as heavenly harp strings.

'Mid such music of Hope, 

light grew, multiplying as tho' Dawn

her flame had placed betwixt enchanted

crystal mirrors,

suffusing the bitter, dispossessed air

with brittle brightness.

Dewdrops fell  from lilting leaves

to the ground too long

untouched by tears,

sowing memories of joy and grief

that had hallowed the soil 

that nourished them, these golden

keys to wonders that awaited

beyond the spheres of Night and Day.

'Mid peaceful quiet, this space

now breathes, restored to wholeness,

weaned away from rancour,

its fragrant pulse beating in accord

with Earth's, 

with the heart of Summer's Queen,

Beauty's healing instrument.

© 2015 Lily's Verse

Lilium Candidum

Image: ROSES (edited)

Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Artist: Anna Syberg

WINTER MOON

Winter's marmoreal sibyl murmured
through Nature's whispered
encomium of swirling white and blue,
echoes of her etheric edicts 
rising past ash-veined pillars of Nyx's
palace into ravaged realms
of ancient battles where unborn stars
now rest.

"Life alternate dances with Dark and Light
through Birth and Death,
through each great circle of Creation.
Such is sacred natural order;
sole Time's hands could rule its course.

This eternal lore-master speaks to the wise 
who read the trees, the heavens,
the silver script upon my arcing pathway,
the flight of the crane over divine waters.
Thus shall the river of your consciousness
shoal, quenching the flame of thought,
enlivening the spirit,
leading you toward celestial shrines.

There, the altars ray forth a stillness; 
by such you would hear the Source.
Sully not this pure tranquility; 
speak a language made bare of words,
one that invokes wind, fire, sea and stars,
that kindles existence from within.

Let your being bear this silence to your
fellow men, for to illumine their souls,
that you may be Elysium's earthly altars."

© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: MOONLIT WINTER LANDSCAPE
Source: picssr.com
Artist: Louis Douzette

BEAUTY XIII

A rare Light I beheld, a diffuse sliver

of indeterminate hues

and elemental motion that beckons

to lost souls wandering 

purposeless, pathless, thro' the

darkest Darkness, fluttering betwixt

existence and non-existence.

My breath and steps it sunward drew,

this pavé of spinning,

renewing azure and mysterious airglow

that was at once muse and artist,

canvas and pigment,

rendering distinct life-scapes I savoured

with a child's clear eye.

A long-frozen riverful of journeys flowed

anew, restored to its rightful

dominion 'neath rippling veils of dreams,

sparking music and visions in my

barren spirit, as if to paint jewelled

heavens 'pon my inmost dark, 

that I may ne'er more be bereft of light.

A distant grey Autumn day

my heart recalled, when a bed of late

violets, by the early frost untouched,

greeted my gloom.

Of a bygone Winter I bethought myself,

when a span of Summer

I had espied wedged beneath snow-clad 

rocks, her green melody

chiming thro' hibernal winds' keening.

Spaces of fortitude thro' lives I retrieved,

revived, where the air imbued my being

as a divine elixir,

bearing me thro' blackness into starry skies.

Such blessings Beauty detailed,

for Hope to bestow 'pon Her forlorn pilgrim.

© 2015 Lily's Verse

Lilium Candidum

Image: THE PEARLS OF APHRODITE

Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Artist: Herbert James Draper

TIME

The music of sunrise exalts my waves,

its notes clustering upon crests

as celestial constellations,

crowning Creation's brow with the light

of stellar assemblages.

Upon the banks of my candescent flow,

Spring dances her elation to my

Eternal Rhythm;

Summer sings of ripening plenitude;

Autumn strews her red-gold handiwork;

Winter weaves her fleecy coverlet 

of feathery flurries and flakes.

The Great Source

wrought my winding mosaic, 

Nature's own canvas, fluid and limitless,

changeless, yet commanding and

conducting change, that her patterns may

limn cosmic design.

My compass no mortal shall ever measure,

nor mystics construe,

for my path spirals from horizon to 

fathomless horizon, through Universes into

the heart of the Great Source.

Seek not my bournes, rather, survey my core 

in oceans of blue beyond the clouds,

in rippling skies within Earth's saline womb, 

by voiceless rocks solemn as monks

knelt in prayer, 

in distant expanses of auroral radiance,

in the beating of your blood,

in the processing of rivers and the Seasons. 

Wonder shall guide you nearer me,

aye, nearer the mighty Cosmic Mind 

that conceived Life.

© 2015 Lily's Verse

Lilium Candidum

Image: A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME
Source: www.wikiart.org
Artist: Nicolas Poussin

HYPNAGOGIA

Upon a streak of blazing blackness,

I journeyed toward a new

awakening where Darkness awaited, 

tempests in his flinty eyes, 

his raven haired consort by his side,

their disquieting beauty 

fiercely flaring upon the fringes of 

dazzling, drunken deeps 

that had quaffed liquid gold.

The light of Beauty's abode flooded its 

shorelines, an amalgam of 

thunderbolts and moonlit swansdown,

nor vaunting, nor proclaiming

its noble provenance, outvying celestial

jewels with its magnificence, 

humble before the core of that which

had burned to give it birth.

By this sublime illumination, the goddess

enfolded the dark-winged Oneiroi,

these emissaries of Elysium,

fleeting visions of man's slumbers,

sibylline and mystical, affrighting and

deceitful, blissful and importless,

yet threads that bind him to his mortal

fate in the realm of Death's brother.

She, Nature's second soul, 

sought to tinge her favoured children's

dreams with Her glory,

lest they not awake to Creation's own.

© 2015 Lily's Verse

Lilium Candidum

Image: DREAM IDYLL

Source: www.liveinternet.ru

Artist: Edward Robert Hughes

BEAUTY WEPT

Through webs of heavenly heliotrope
I beheld Beauty weep for Her
chastened, cozened pilgrim mired in
a brooding, hiemal Dark of his own
devising, lamenting prayers unheeded
and the grace of Parnassus withheld.

"By callous cosmic disposition am I
scourged, born under a vagrant, 
variable Star of inconstant course,
of eclipsed orb and mutable radiance,
by its varicoloured caprice across Life's
Seasons to fruitless pursuits urged.

My muse, now befuddled and breathless,
droops upon shorn meadows white
with frost, where once she swayed in
Spring's saporous embrace, clad in her
sprigged skirts, unheeded languished,
though her hand be deathless.

The voice in my quill, the tint in my brush,
lies amid the frozen ruins of my 
thwarted aspirations, pale and songless 
as my own spirit, her labours squandered
upon a pleasure-seeking heart that
spurned purpose with youth's first flush.

Winter's wizened light descends as a pall
over past joys and pain, laid to rest
with maps rent and paths unexplored.
Nor limbs nor mind could defy Time's will,
triumph over Life's last Season, though
her march I faltering seek to stall.

My homeward Path illumine, vagrant One,
past the eternally toiling Fates, toward
etheric gates, for my mettle wanes as my
bones thin; my senses would no more of
glitter and din. Muse of my heart, lead me
to the Star of my Dreams beyond the Sun."

© 2015 Lily's Verse

Lilium Candidum

Image: DAY AND THE DAWNSTAR

source: www.liveinternet.ru

Artist: Herbert James Draper

BEAUTY XII

Selene will not have me weep

this night, a tardy scribe

marooned upon black sands

musing upon petrified

remnants of visions abandoned

and convictions lost,

now mere playthings of

the flagrant, flouting froth.

Through brightness that evades

me, she unbends her limbs;

pearly hands, gently chiding,

ivory fingers, tenderly guiding,

draw my teary eyes from tumbling,

tattered, travestying tides 

to seas of sericious silver-blue,

where the gods sail 

waves of peacock haze,

for Beauty's dreams harbour there 

amid aery pillars

of glistering perse and

topaz star mists along the shores

of Night, in a sphere 

that knows abiding light.

Here, I shall seek Beauty's lair,

till Dawn bids me descend

Nyx's starry stair,

for Spring now slumbers beneath

the snow, her blossoms

stowed in the Great Below.

Stellar journeys would engender such

longing, the Stars to trail

through westward portals thronging;

yet, upon Day's threshold, I shall

cast off all remorse,

gratitude speak for my blessed

earthly course.

© 2015 Lily's Verse

Lilium Candidum

Image: MOON NYMPH

Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Artist: Luis Ricardo Falero

BEAUTY XI

Thro' fretful skies I looked toward 

Her celestial abode,

where once upon a Universe

She lay in a cradle of lapis mist,

swaddled in star-strewn sapphire,

as Time's mystic gaze 

kindled Her breath.

The Great Sage of the North whirls,

Shepherd of the heavens,

this sacred cycle Her shrine and

Keeper of Her altar.

Blessed are you, Polaris, for you

serve a primordial goddess,

one, before whom Elysium bows,

though she departed its pantheon,

forsook its rainbow tumult,

for to lend wings to Life.

I fancied I beheld Her this noontide

in the midst of Summer's 

lustrous lushness, flooding the green 

with luminous moments of the past.

In the arms of Zephyrus

she danced, carving waves upon the

tender emerald grass,

her steps tracing olden waters' flow.

By their unseen banks, Life,

the mighty Artificer, imprinted Her will

upon primeval clay with ancient quills, 

scripting Autumn's copper tread,

Winter's pearly, pallid haze,

the violet-blue fire of next Spring's gaze.

Upon the down of an ivory moment

She sailed into the winged welkin,

leaving Light echoes

rippling through the gilded air.

Mayhap She confers this night with 

Her astral Priest, 

for his countenance shines with 

the profoundest reverence. 

© 2015 Lily's Verse

Lilium Candidum

Image: DOUBLE STAR (edited)

Source: commons.wikimedia.org

Artist: Luis Ricardo Falero