Thursday 31 December 2015


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
Artist: Mary Lizzie Macomber

Monday 28 December 2015



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)
Artist: Anna Syberg

Friday 25 December 2015


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

Wednesday 23 December 2015

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
Artist: Herbert James Draper

Sunday 20 December 2015


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

Friday 18 December 2015



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
Artist: Edward Robert Hughes

Wednesday 16 December 2015


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

Saturday 12 December 2015



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

Tuesday 8 December 2015



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