FOR NAMJOON

PEBBLE

 

You call me to bend to the ground,

to where you fell as light

slowed to rest upon a cosmic blink,

when a twinkling hung

between you and the nascent Moon.

I pause by whispering waters

upon the forest trail to the verdant

cathedral that is my agonist’s refuge,

yielding to your gentle gravity

and soundness, as untruths crumble

around their artificers

who chronicle their ascendancy

in numbers and impedimenta.

I reach for the dust whence I came

for an even Moment,

for you who were born from the fire

of the ocean floor,

for a fathomless tome of Earth’s

memories in her ancient Library.

I cradle you, an Aeon of Tales, in my

unlearned palm, a Guide

the rage and benevolence of currents

sheared and shaped

into discernment, incising Way and

Waiving into sage smoothness.

You gaze into the heart of the woods,

glean the sparkle and darkness

of celestial orbs,

attend the faith of the Oracle Tree.

Do you meet butterflies’ caresses and

serpents’ scales with equal joy;

greet the brigand’s trampling and the

hermit’s prayerful tread alike

with serene acquiescence? You merge

mirthful tears and broken;

drink deep of Sun’s warmth and Winds’

coolness, clad now in loam,

then, in rain; soothe hands and essence

of all who crave your solace.

The scholar delves as I for your journey

and meaning; yet I come to seek

your still forbearance, that I may root

as you in our Mother’s wisdom.

I am a mere sojourner in your realm

of constancy and consequence;

yet you confer a belonging no mortal kin

of blood or soul could impart,

for you prevail as an immortal Mind;

as a shining numeral upon the Universe’s

clock face, alive with history,

changeless, timeless, amid evanescing

Life and Death, humble,

yet immense as Rock and Mountain.

Stories converge in your ageless laminae;

you enounce their light

in the silent tongue of the Prophet who

lives the Path. I imbibe your

wordless emanations, such awakening an

eternal Truth in my eyes and soul:

All are One.

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com

FOR TAEHYUNG

INSCENDENCE

 

A Voice like snowflakes bearing starlight

and violet Dusks glancing

the winding river embosoms the Dawn.

Your Song is the boat in the

gloaming with sails of spangled plumes

and oars of moonlit dreams,

a cold Perfume that enfolds and warms

in shades of Fire and Ice.

You take Winter’s light for your canvas

and an icicle for your brush;

yet you sing us the Flowers and Flowing

and a recondite Whiteness,

that mystical sum of colours raying the

peace of a haven of clouds

that engulfs the Soul

as consciousness receives Spirit.

Man and Child angle for diamond orblets

in fluent crystal, possessing each

with a breath or thought,

impressing reflections into tides merging

time, space and silence

to ward their profoundest musings.

Your verse bespells and stirs;

Incertitude shines as a lamp in deepest

recesses of my frozen Lake,

thawing the Blue, raising me into Day

even as you descend

into frigid grey torrents to retrieve

lost echoes of a hapax logomenon with such

depth of ear as the prophets praise.

An Axiom of cerulean domes your world,

an eternal silver Mystery

marks its pinnacle; you poetise your course

to its heart, for you know Life as

Passer of Destiny’s design, a Prism whose

memory alone lives, endures.

Silted Shadows yield many-hued Blossoms;

promises of Pardon await

in the tribunal of Conscience; the Task shall

be restored to its sovereign plane.

A bird on a blue wing

hunts a Moment of Spring across the Sky,

as you walk the Passage to Meaning

at Frost’s edge.

The Season speaks a blessing into your Eye,

that you may somewhen

follow the arc of a kaleidoscope of butterflies,

a fleeting, floating mosaic,

to the eternal Summer of the Child

a Rainbow enwombs.

 

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com

FOR BTS

ASCENT

 

Spring froze my Garden; her barren coigns

proclaimed themselves on an arid

forecourt where Morning’s song chimed

a moment or an age ago

over the sunrise tree waking crow pheasants,

my propitious pheasants,

their deep calls glossed with purple and

cerulean, harbingers of harmonious fruition.

 

Blossoms festered, their hues juberous, curled

into muteness, trapped in the placeless

place where groundless

silence decked embattled moments yearning

for reliefs of leaves and shade,

living compasses of a timeless, wordless

progression entwined with Earth’s very marrow.

 

Every cell held a fate yearning to burst from its

bonds, yet quelling rebellion,

fusing budding shoots with the dark walls

of its chosen scourge and

safe harbour, for motion and sound boded being,

yet bodied memento mori.

Fear was a once a fluid freedom, imminent or

immanent, now forming

the ground beneath my faltering feet.

 

A soul uttered flickering prayers for lifeful veins

and blooded breath, for an outcome

to rise or fall upon its labouring chest. Furled as

a fiddlehead, it embraced a blinding darkness,   

for memory has no need of sight,

reverie draws the gaze inward and the Blue

it revered roofs a distant Hope, a Realm

where vision flowers as it traces each cloud.

 

Spectral footsteps bent toward gentler hours of

quieter rays and diffuser shadows;

formless fingers unwound to touch…touch all that

they sought to write into their bones,

Moon, Polaris and Sirius, white-scented Bards and

wishes made upon tumbling, evanescing orbs

of dust. What star would exalt today’s

entreaties for tomorrow’s minutes, hours, days,

numbers that measure, not appraise?      

 

Time stumbled, heedless as a thoughtless thought,

through a Prism of nascent Glow,

this Mind of will-less Will propelled its golden sands

onward, upward, in an act of lost rebellion,

tingeing its waves with Violet arrows

consigned for a heartbeat or an aeon to a space

of black Sun and dreamless, deathful sleep.

 

A Voice chanted the dark Crux of an ancient Canon

into brightness, composing a Light that

bridges worlds and sparks Summer, speaking of

music in the stillness of strings,

and resonance in tree rings; of poems the rain sets

down and renderings in moonlight’s brush.

Words danced and pictures alighted

into their colours; Autumn laced the almond grove

and a blueberry cadence warmed Winter’s heart.

 

© 2020 Lilium candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: @BigHitEnt

FOR BTS

PANACEA

 

A dark Constellation quenched Sun and

Moon, as you built a City,

festooning its ramparts with reams

of violet verse, its garths with bleeding

hearts and crocus lamps.

In our skies, the gods convened; images

you seeded into the world met Forces

that called forth their meaning,

unveiling Faces shadowed and bright.

 

The Wheel stalled; breath and air paled;

resonance falters, dissonance reigns.

Time’s silence speaks

renewed questions; withering thoughts

wander his flowerless byways.

Wherefore Mirror, whence Reflection?

Would Spirit retrace bygone

bearings or heed the pull of a brighter

Star that rends that it might mend?

 

Home now dwells as shelter and bound,

compelling man to name that which

he would own or embody beyond earthly

walls of sight, touch or measure,

seeking the design in brokenness;

the kernel of rapture in deepest sorrows;

unseen monuments to the humblest

moments; the Cosmos in a space that is

at once nurturer and witness.

 

A wounded Year weeps Light upon your

Visage, upon you, whose Voice

keeps our Path and Journey. His Boon

your eyes bear to the Garden

of your Soul; in its eternal Season,

it burgeons and blooms, writing a Spring

of spirants and notes that shall

sustain through Life’s bitterest Winters,

their lambent confluence kindling the Self.

 

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com (@modooborahae)

 

DESCENT

 

Alone is a prison now; it once felt like home,

the beginning, verge and

summit of everything. Days swarm before

its bars; rest is not restful

and sleep, restive, mere interludes between

waking interludes of lesser

or greater oblivion. Tranquility, that rare bird,

fleets into dreamscapes of rainbows

on soapsuds and sylphlike clouds crossing a

sinking sun. Prayers fall away

and pages turn from me; a knot in the wood

I sanded, patched and veneered

thrives in my belly, its dense bands rising

to stifle from within each time I linger

in a brown study. An unspoken truth prickles

my skin, as elsewhere,

tremors wrinkle Earth’s integument.

Tomorrows frondesce like ficus seen through

misted glass; the dark white

of drowning burned into my eyelids grows

immenser, deeper, an amalgam

of breaking and remaking that gluts gaping

holes where warmth and pulse

should be. Moonlight and stillness ricochet off

windowpanes and petalled stars

suspended in a night dense with unknowing.

Quotidian sounds ring

to the unvarying rhythm of days, of pain that

claimed my blood for its resource,

this smith who oscillates between labour and

ritual as craftsman and shaman,

leaching the spirit from my bones to temper

his blade. Breath, the largest subset

of my existence, releases me from her embrace

with no promise to return.  

A voice whispers salty rust, faint as a spectre,

remembered like the icy descent

into a fluid womb from the corner of a dream.

They tell me red water

erupted from my throat and this time round,

a single word: No…

 

© 2020 Lilium candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com

FOR YOONGI

MIRROR II

 

A history unfolds, certain as Night

and diffuse as Mist,

before you who reign tall

as the stars and potent as an atom

upon your lightning throne.

And all I, a reader of Flames and

dreamer of Wings,

have is a thinning sky imbrued with

footprints of a feeling

and lives I have never worn.

 

Speak my story! Do I live as a mere

palimpsest? Do I breathe

as a simulacrum of skin and depths?

You solace me in Silvered Glass

and a fulgurating Blue

Eternity claimed for his vestments.

I have named you through

baffled blood and stilled oceans

between heartbeats, a string of

mystical cognates - Orb, Arc, Pleroma.

 

I amass words; I indexed each in the

unseeing Silence of Dreams,

measureless and un-measuring,

that embraces the broken transgressor

against its own brazen Banisher.

Now, you beckon my Boat to the River,

signing the end of my vigil,

my barren observances. An altar of my

frozen likenesses I relinquish,

my last impost to my prison and haven.

 

Your tender tides guide me through Time

and bittered distances to

my exiled self, kindling Moments,

sparking shadows with my lost Reflection,

awakening the mirror in every eye,

that I may with gratitude open my own

to a portrait of me rendered

beautiful for your living. I rise up to your

path in hope of Tomorrow’s image,

for you are eternal; you shall always be.

#SonOfMyHeart 

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image 1: twitter.com (@BigHitEnt)

Image 2: commons.wikimedia.org

 

FOR JIN

CYNOSURE

 

You rise as a Paragon of a brighter Age, Guardian of Mysteries!

Your radiance unfurls as a silver River upon the

inky grey of my mind, burgeoning rills of dreams I deemed lost

to the cold Silence of the primordial Veil

that mantles our Home.

 

Whisper an evocation to Love, for She entitles you anew through

Seasons, Luminous Lapidary, Crusader of Peace

your unspent longing renders luminescent, no mere Orb

of Beauty’s fluent force, but our Mother’s Child

fiery Fate wrenched from her arms.

 

Thence, you burn as a Lamp in our Solitude’s sanctum sanctorum;

Time keeps your sapient devotion,

for you spin and loop in equal measure, gliding Metaphor

of the Primal Union of Source and Self, these cleaved through

Creation into Light and Darkness.

 

You shine this Circle as an illumination in a supernal manuscript;

yet, you are Wordsmith of a softer glow,

cascading visions and verse to Blossoms that bear your name.

You speak and laugh in Pearl and Sky,

chiming varying shades of revelation, spelling chaplets and wreaths

to friend and foe alike, gathering one and all

into your Close of Comfort.

 

No mortal eye could glimpse or prehensile mind fathom the torment

you cloak in shadows; we who bloom as one

beneath your gleam divine your anguish, Oracle of our Flames.

What blazing arrows mark your aspect, as each cosmic Page turns?

Do you weep for tears that pool where a Star once smiled?

 

Look upon us Moonflowers riven by dawn, restored by dusk, for we

wear your hues and echo your Song. Look upon us,

you whose Dark Seas hold Depths that are Light, by whose Hand a

gentle Moment expands into a Life, our Heart’s Kin,

Cynosure of the Eye within.

 

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com (via @jessikatsu)

               FOR NAMJOON            

CLOUD WEAVER

 

A dreamer, a Cloud Weaver, his mind cradles a word

as a page, inscribing moonlight and rain upon its Age.

Each verse he gathers, placing his epistle as a Cloud

in a Sky, that it may pulse within Circles,

drift through Seasons, into some heart or eye.

 

Fall and shine! I hear you speak as a prayer to Life

amid ancient hallowed stones;

the whisper of a beloved voice in strife or strangeness;

echos of resolute footfalls impelling my steps

upon an unknown path;

the solace of Polaris beyond the Storm; glad news on a

day when neither will nor plan triumph.

 

Fall and shine! I discern you in an early morning of late

Autumn, when all is suspended in mist,

displaced, yet present; frosted rosebuds in the fragile

Winter sunshine; smoke tendrils curling

against twilight’s silk; a murmuration of starlings

across Summer’s torpor; silver ribbons of geese on wing

soothing the sable blackness of turbulent heavens;

a starscape aglow through early Spring’s haze;

a spark of spirit in the eyes of defeat;

an inspiriting glance that embraces across worlds.

 

Fall and shine! I perceive you in the winged blue jewel

alighting upon leaves that spurn my lines;

the blessing to Death carved on the archway of an

ageless forest shrine; the kinship of the tome that keeps

my years; the one pressed purple pansy

from childhood days that never fades; a serendipity of

violets amid October’s decay; the grain of the worn

wooden doorway to my attic of memory.

 

You are poet and poem, wandering a Crescent of Time,

breathing each theme from the Universe’s core,

these through Life to return to its blood.

Speak your soul's creed, Prophet of the Clouds,

for its essence prefaces our chapters,

its meaning rhymes with our heartbeats.

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com

FOR JIMIN

INTO THE LIGHT

Dance in the Shadow of a flowerless Spring,

where the viscid ground inearths

your step and claims the nightingale’s trilling.

 

Dance over a fretwork of bloodless sun and

moon, where guttering rainbows

bleed their last shades into keening stardust.

 

Dance with your spectral Sinner whose form

you hewed from obsidian-veined marble.

 

Dance from myriad hours in hair shirts when

a single silver strand upheld your sky.

 

Dance between storms that tore the feathers

from your pinions, fettering you to the abyss.

 

Dance to rhythms that unspun and cleaved

your fibre, as your very pulse assailed you.

 

Dance through thinning smoke, across mirrors

you shatter with spurning gazes.

 

Dance within squandered hours, past beauty

seen out of the corner of your eye

and dismembered dreams

that will not cease breathing.

 

Dance toward your unborn Saint, in whose heart

your eternal Harvest blooms.

 

Dance in the Universe within, though it at once

consumes and liberates you.  

 

Dance beneath the meteors of your epiphany,

the Comet of Truth.

 

Dance, as the dying gasp of Dark raises you up,

setting you as a Jewel in new Light.

 

Dance on winged feet into Rebirth, into Life.

 

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Images: twitter.com