Saturday 29 August 2015



TRANCE



I am a glaucous haze gliding along
the curves of an indigo vortex,
sliding past silver filaments and
stippled grey webs. Unseen forces
propel my misty form upon its
helical path through time and space
toward an Infinite Nothingness
its own thirst for knowledge impels
to birth and death.

A fugue of flimmering and flowing,
of floating and flowering, 
of fragrant films, winds and curls
as a vaporous stream, lithe,
diffuse, yet cohering, lacing lattices
of lambent Light, unchanging, 
unmoving, this companion of the
soul's sublime solitude.

A pale gold unguent bathes the void,
glazes strands so slight,
these I scarce can sight. How it glows
and warms, this fruit of
intrepid odysseys o'er Life's pathways, 
of tyrants and temptations
vanquished, faintly fulgurating,
as Dawn's flame in the bell of a lily!


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: TAMMUZ
Source: www.museumsyndicate.com
Artist: Mordecai Ardon

Thursday 27 August 2015



MITERA


I see you still, entelechy
of Nature's purest
indwelling light; token of her
vivifying Grace; paragon
of beauty and love, of faith
and fortitude, of unfading
flush and unfettered flow.

Rooted to Earth, you held up
my skies, as a fragile
stem raising up a windflower
of heavenly blue, eyes
cast sun-ward, as lapis lamps
toward a blessed blaze
in Apollo's shrine.

Your piety gleamed as his rays,
charioting 'cross fleec'd
plains, scrawling your paeans
'pon gilt scrolls, that Nephelae
may echo his praises,
that their silver strains, melded
with Elysium's rainbow tears, 
may sanctify the ground.

Tongues enounce your hymns
now, great spirit; shadows
and phantasms hold sway, for
souls fell silent in the clanging
dark of empty radiance.
I seek the skies that hold you,
the only Mother I ever knew.


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org
Artist: Philip Hermogenes Calderon

Tuesday 25 August 2015



SILVER AND GOLD

He hunted alabaster and rosy beams, 
silver smiles and golden dreams,
enticing, scheming and reaming,
plundering the land by day and night
in restless, ravaging flight.

As a marauding horde his ebony steeds
thundered o'er vales and meads,
glistening as polished jet 'neath 
glittering veins feeding wrathful skies,
his constant kith and allies.

'Pon the youth their kinfolk gazed in fright,
for, bereft of their wonted light,
all Earth grew silent and solemn.
What ailed their dearest, they knew not,
for such wanted for naught.

"Doth not the sun's bounty shine upon you?
The Wheel turneth even and true.
Nature's grace our lives blesseth.
Wherefore, pray, could ye young not be
blithesome and content as we?"

The soul's bereftness they sought to quell
with earthly gold's insidious spell.
Its spurious gleam cast smiles and dreams.
This contagion to their heirs they ceded,
it reigns o'er mankind unimpeded.


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: THE DREAMERS
Source: www.zazzle.com
Artist: Albert Joseph Moore

Sunday 23 August 2015


THE WITCH


Her smile was a mezzaluna,
her only sigil,
its glint in her gait and
eyes.

She wielded its cold blade like
a baton in a grand
orchestration of
perplexity, a perpetual fugue of
pervasive perfidies,
a perfected path
to perdition.

In a spell of continual, corroding
confoundment,
she bound earth and sky,
drowning out the
footsteps of winds and waves.

Each day was a gleeful Sabbat,
a ritual feast of
drawing the Sun's crimson,
bathing her bloodless
instrument
in an ocean of warmth,
before I could commit His light to
memory.

What could surfeit this vampire?
Not the blood of a
Universe of Suns.  
Her spirit walks abroad,
stalking His light,
devouring every 
golden ray in
my skies.

Upon the wing of darkness she bolts
past the light.


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: MAY MARGARET
Source: www.pinterest.com
Artist: Frederick Sandys

Friday 21 August 2015



DELUGE


Heaven's grief descended upon
Earth; swelling cataracts
of greedy gushing grey swamped
our fields and orchards; 
watery mills ground man's boast 
and bravado into toneless,
grain-less nothingness.

We erupted with the sky, cursing
cruel Fate, bemoaning 
the exigencies of fickle fortune,
comparing gashes and
scars, clouding chill chambers and 
coigns in a cacophony 
of contrived commiseration. 

The artist alone would not be impelled
to indulgent dejection;
into his ken the light floated through 
the gauntly black boreal
tumult, elevating his heart and hands
into realms of peaceful
kinship with celestial design.

A sublimity he composed, a jubilant
chiaroscuro echoing Nature's
facture, earthly prolegomenon to her
sacred tomes. I stand this
day before its amplitude, listening for
the music of raindrops,
for the sighs of the dying deluge.


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: STORM IN THE NORTH SEA
Artist: Ivan Aivazovsky

Tuesday 18 August 2015


REDEMPTION


Away, Hypnos! I shall not rest
this freshened Night, 
Summer's own magnum opus, 
sinuous silver streaks
and thundering torrents carved. 
Nay, Zeus' conferment
was not crafted for sleep, nor
for wisdom gleaned from
bloodless pages by pale flames.

This glimmering, humming Dark
was devised for musing 
upon greater matters beneath the
fey, watery glow of laved
skies, of solemn celestial tapers. 
The eminence beckons;
ringing rillets speak sparkle and
spirit, that I may describe
my pathway across yielding earth.

Upon the hill, I shall commune with
the crystal air, its barricades
laid to waste by corroding cascades.
Amid such synergy, I am 
purely soul, confronted by my truest
self, frail and unguarded
before my own eyes, yet safe from
reprehension, for the lustrating
arms of eternal redemption
enfold me. 


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: PROFILE OF A WOMAN LOOKING AT THE STARS
Source: imgkid.com
Artist: Alois Heinrich Priechenfried

Sunday 16 August 2015


SHRINE

Earth is our shrine, mountains and rivers
her sanctums. Mighty trunks
and boughs, her columns and lintels, reach
into the azure; varied fretwork
canopies her spreads, emerald thro' Spring 
and Summer, red-gold thro' Autumn,
silver-white thro' Winter, that all 
their eyes may raise to yonder baldachin;
that blossoms, these tinted 
censers, may waft their fragrance 
into empyrean spaces.

The Seasons advance, the great Mother's
High Priestesses, bearing gifts
of paeans in their throats, myriad hues in 
eyes and tresses, scents in their
breath and garlands in their arms, for this
temple to bedeck with finery
and song. Spirits of Air, Sky, Water, Earth
and Fire they lead in prayer, 
in continual reverence, altars awash in the 
Great Fire's bounty by Day, by Night 
'neath the pale argent glow of a distant 
crystal veil, oft in clouds' cool libations.

Our praise and gratitude to the Universe we
sing, to the Elements, the Moon 
and Stars, to Life and Death, thro' tempests
and calm, thro' floods and drought,
Earth's gentlest creatures in attendance. 
Man once partook of this grace, ere pride 
hewed a path into his being, ere mundane 
riches blinded his soul to a higher Gold. 
He yearns, he knows not wherefore. 
Choicest feasts would not sate his spirit's 
hunger, nor gilded founts quench its thirst. 

Could marble palaces stave off misfortune?
Death and sorrow pervade the
stoutest stone walls. Man falters in darkness,
for he turns from the light. His words
seek to gloze and confound, belie his cruel
masquerade, cruellest unto himself.
His eristic speech rattles in the vales, e'en
silences birdsong. That which presently
shields, shall somewhen confine and shroud.
I, as all Spirits, pray for his deliverance,
that his soul's vision may triumph.



© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: THE BLUEBELL WOOD
Source: www.liveinternet.ru
Artist: Beatrice Emma Parsons

Thursday 13 August 2015


VISION II

A serrate cry slashed the clear,
calmly clinquant Night,
dispelling the holy hush of the
Mystic's celestial contemplation. 
Shore birds littered the
silvered waterline as shorn white 
flamelets, the Moon's
fulsome nacreous blaze their 
anguished shrieks rent.

Entranced, she gazed upon pearl
dust merging with the
dreaming ocean, stirring the 
waters, beckoning spuming swells
to thirsting shores - a lucent
dance of waves and mirrored ivory
fire in Earth's briny votive,
as its deepest currents embraced
the silver-gold sands.

Time and Nature wrought a vision
of cosmic will upon Life's
realm, from shattered flames, air
and sea rendered a sublime 
sculpture, a feast of the Elements,
that man may savour the
elation of prayerful adoration upon
his journey through this
fount of felicity and forlornness.

The luminous silence emanated an
inviolable truth, bursting forth
as a tidal wave from the depths of
the aeons. "Divinity dwells
within all Creation and speaks its
mysteries to each one who 
would listen with the soul. Its beauty
shines in the shattered and the
whole, indeed, in every broken flame."


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: IPHIGENIA
Source: www.flickr.com
Artist: Herbert Gustave Schmalz

Tuesday 11 August 2015


NASCENCE


The void shuddered, this soundless,

light-less, wordless, time-less,

space-less expanse of non-being.

It knew not why,

nor what stirred its depths,

what force of no apparent genesis

quivered in its hushed vastness,

only that it perceived a spark,

an insubstantial wave that grew

into an abrupt thrill,

burgeoning, suffusing the limitless

lacuna with its might.

 

Curiosity, this newborn, discarnate

instrument, glided into its space,

impelling it to seek continua,

the visible, to relinquish the absolute

for privation and profusion,

for a feast of the elements would

crown its incarnation into substance -

shade and shadow,

dark and darkness,

the dance of will and Fate.

 

"Leap, little void, through Light into

Creation! The veins of Life and Death

shall nourish you

on your journey through the Seasons,

infant Soul, as you yield

to a higher mandate,

to the great Progenitor of the Universe.

Joyful tread the path to awareness,

that you may sow, grow and reap

through the sacred circle,

that you may once more merge

with the greater Void."


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum

Image: FALLING STAR
Source: commons.wikimedia.org
Artist: Witold Pruszkowski

Saturday 8 August 2015


STAR CHILD

We tread concurrent foot-ways,
you and I, though light
years apart. Your radiance would
blind me, child, were you
any nearer; it could not reveal
me to myself nor enlarge
my courage and apprehension.

In the distance, your light whelms
worlds and suns, as my 
eyes, this night rivers in spate, too
long a weight upon my 
form and its shadow, under starry 
sweeps, far from your earthly rest, 
deliver their briny eulogium.

The sky bends earthward with its
brilliant burden, as it 
did one or one thousand sunsets
agone, a worthy yet paltry
receptacle for sumptuous beauty
so splendidly arrayed -
Cygnus, Polaris, the fair Pleiades.... 

Yes, the firmament sees, as I, that
sacred hour I held your
fragile frame in my arms, more soul
than shape, as you gathered
unto you those whose voice is light,
plucking such as pendant
blossoms from a silvery bower.

I shall find you, my star child, nestled
upon your celestial Mother's
bosom, if She so ordains.


© 2015 Lily's Verse
Lilium Candidum


Image: THE CHILD AND THE STAR
Source: www.flickr.com
Artist: Alfred Fowler Patten