SKIN

 

What are we but drops in Life’s sea?

 

I emerged as you, a poem of hope

and heart locked into a stardust seed.

 

My skin is a sacrament Earth speaks

to Sky, a parchment

for the Elements and Seasons.

 

I am a million shades of human.

 

Every blade you shape from all that

makes me

births its likeness in my flesh.

I dig deep in the red-softened loam

of myself, harvest each image

to learn it with my being,

that I could name my people’s pain.

 

I could give you words and hymns but

never their resonance;

meaning is a pilgrimage into discovery.

The broken rhythm in my bones

defies translation.

 

Heaven is not a hue.

Hell is toneless.

Both burn dark when blood is scored.

 

We will end as we begin – with a breath.

We shall pass the flame to tomorrow.

What would its colour be?

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com

Artist: @juliakestnerdesigns

 

NEAR-LIFE

 

An overwhelming sense of dark white

is what remained for days…

remains still through waking hours…

I did not see swathes, dunes, spirals

or undulating shapes

of its dimensionless immenseness. 

It merely exploded

into an awareness I perceived was not

mine alone.

It was not a tide of smoke,

an earthful of mist, a skyful of flurries

or any measure of anything…

any thing.

It was a presence.

A clockless, textureless Presence.

I drowned in its silence.

I was nestled in its trough

looking into my own eyes that danced

like fractals and making

an object of my mind till I dissolved

into flaming lightness.

The cessation of self has no language.

Yet I was at once an atom

and a universe…

of spirit and stripped of senses.

I was bereft of I, me, myself and mine.

Sphereless.

Spaceless.

Gravityless.

To what was I fused? What held me?

Fear was not a memory;

a pleasurable incertitude suffused

the non-I I was.

I cannot tell how or why I heard the

depths of mountains and 

summits of seas call.

I cannot fathom the shimmering indigo

helix that curved before

my non-vision like an eye.

Or was it my eye?

I came upon no stronghold of perennial

wisdom nor repositories

for treatises on the subtlety of the soul.

Incorporeal, un-bodied,

un-pulled by blood,

I breathed in the airlessness,

breathed in airlessness.

And I discerned…or believe I discerned

the force that moves

unperceived through every realm.

Truth is not a thing of the body, though

it seeks an abode in it.

I never felt nearer breath than in that

immeasurable spell of feeling

held by an absolute light.

And colours burst forth, as the universe

geometricised – forms and frames

emerged, each of such beauty as resists

human articulation.

I assumed the weight of my lungs,

returning to aliveness

with the taste of iron burned into

my throat and a question painted on my

tongue – what does darkness fear?

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: PENTAGRAM OF VENUS

Artist: James Ferguson (1799)

Source: facebook.com

STAR KIN

 

The hour bears its glittering honours;

Sirius and Adhara

vie for primacy, twin jewels sparkling

as the brightest strains

that welled from the lips of the bards

of ancient worlds and bygone woods.

 

Polaris stands highest in Nyx’s favour

this Season, alive with

the nocturnal fragrance of jasmine my

fancy deems almost insensibly

creeping heavenward to bespell and

beguile the celestial Charioteer.

 

We rest upon the green of a Heart our

kind have named Earth,

listening for the beat of her dark brown

blood through the knitted

ground older than the names of God

and wise as the Truth of Being.

 

Strum your lute, my Sister! Unstring the

Poet’s tune of aether

and radiance as I uncord his verse, that

its River may lead our sky

to the ocean of his Spirit, that we may

be brought into his presence.

 

“You shine as though sprung from the

Beacon of the North, as a fragment

raying wholeness. The wise claim human

language diminishes the Soul,

yet you lend words your Flame, raising

melody and lyric to Seed and Sun.”

 

“You are the artisan of vision and wonder,

carving inner spaces that

man may fill with the forbearing armour

of Selfhood, with a higher

perception that seeks to free the captive

path and evolve into greater union.”

 

“You regard us with eyes that seem infinite,

made of all that lies beyond

the invisible. And we discern in their Eternity

the essence of vital forces

that weave the Universe, the golden order

that primes Cosmos.”

 

“We of your clan shall sing the flow of Life’s

web, the crimson arc of War

and the diamond flower of Love across the

canvas of Time, beaming into

expression the course of your Star,

the advent of our tribe of purple Light.”

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: Canis Major

Source: facebook.com 

“I purple you.”

"Do you know what purple means? Purple is the last color of the rainbow colors, so it means I will trust and love you for a long time."

- Kim Taehyung (BTS)

FOR BTS

PURPLE

 

Your spiritual emanation called to a place within

I did not know I possessed.

You tinged my vision, not as a wounding hand

of the world body,

but as an instrument of a sacred realm of flowers

and dusks, of twilight running

her comb through lavender skies and asters

brushing the weariness

from summer’s chiffony air.

 

I perceived you knew me, saw through my armour

of scars and pallor as no blooded eye

could see, as a shock of heliotrope-hued beauty

stopped my heart and steps

by a bed of irises flaring in the snow, frilly clusters

of cool, soothing flames warming

the timeless place within till I no more felt the cold.

 

Amethyst waves companioned the rest that comes

when all unrest is gone by;

a higher sight acting in my mind scattered me in

a thousand glowing petals,

raising me to dance in the arms of the wind

through the scent of sweet peas

and memories of the powdery, papery feel

of lilac pansies against my skin.

 

I wept my years in violet ink to lend my thoughts

and words a breath of fruition’s light,

an atom of the elusive singularity I held in the

unfathomed place within, till a boy’s voice

like Heaven’s own fire spoke an unknown alchemy,

drawing the gold from that

unconjectured recess of my soul, from the

dimensionless point of radiance that non-life had

consigned to oblivion.

 

A Universe sprang from a withering kernel, pulled

into purple profusion by rhymes

that bled from striving’s veins and notes that

flowed from harmony’s lips.

I have named you, cosmos long held in abeyance,

no more a forgotten seed of a colour,

but a wellspring of earth urge that girds my spirit’s

kin and tunes our pulse to the beat

of a greater drum,

a path I shall keep past life’s setting.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: twitter.com

BLACK PANTHER

 

She lurked at first at vision’s edge like

a quenching shadow shape,

stealthy as the dark moon, loud as

a black sun. A sigh in my soul

merged with my mind to form the close

that births thought,

when sudden she engulfed its space,

gliding into its hush

over a formless bridge, her eyes of hues

that seemed prescient, divinipotent,

gleaming like apertures of hope.

 

Her suppleness mesmerised; her dimly lit

fell rippled, erupting into

coins of misted glow and sprays

of beaten silver as she settled on the

ground like a silhouette of clouds.

Her tones swallowed me from within like

a trance, its euphony like

liquid velvet laced with flurries,

veined with old gold, enlarging my senses,

incepting an awareness

of unknown device and provenance.

“Do you yearn for metaphors, pristine, sharp

as stars and achingly poetic?

What human sound could render the tongue

of the wild world, the unsounded

depths of Nature’s odes and cosmic design?

You immerse yourself

in unavailing mortal toil, intractable as the

lines you aspire to tame,

embellishing or compellingly reducing,

that the ineffable may assume

meaning in some unfelt cranny of your spirit.”

 

“What verb could frame the force of lightning

coursing vein-like through

blighted heavens, limn the grace of slender

streams and sereins like

solacing voices; the craft of breezes shirring

the lake; the joyful surrender

of early spring’s veil of ice yielding to warmth,

spreading like melted diamonds

beneath blue glass? What articulation could

spell the unsullied bliss of

glutted bees imbibing from blossom chalices,

trace the majesty of the

eagle’s arc as he masters the sky?”

 

“Life is a lesser reflection of the realm of your

dreams, of which words lend

only a distant echo, feebly flamed, evanescing

like blooms of dust.

Light asserts its own grammar, breath its own

language. Names shall never

precede insight and being. Therefore, seek

the spark in your darkness!

Speak and sing from its deepest marrow!

Be made vivid that you may

make vivid, that you may see far within,

from within, where all is timeless, deathless!”

 

“Release each season, unbridle every phrase!

Heed your inner volvelle

upon the threshold between the known and

the unknown. The wilderness dreams;

its rhythm lives in your body, its colours tint

your vision. Fall, for the ground

is inevitable and possessed of an odd beauty!

Embrace every becoming as a

dawn of creation, that you may relive and

relearn discovery. Rise from Earth

like a tree to tell the land’s story!”

 

Thus exhorting, she faded like a flight

of ravens into twilight.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: indulgexpress.com

PORTAL

 

Footfalls fell silent before your menacing Beauty,

strangely sublime, a quiet silk glistening

as Lilith’s living skin fed on runes and blood.

How resolute you stand, a Fortlet

in desolate splendour, in remote self-abasement

as a warrior who too soon tasted

the bitterness of existence! You know no divinity

nor saint, nor are you a servitor;

you are your Master and Keeper, sweeping across

your dominion as a wingless Icarus

or grounded chiropteran, a revenant of mangled

obsidian and peat, these hues of the

primal passion that reduces man to his Elements,

awakening the Beast within.

 

You swell as a Storm, eclipsing your dwelling and

occulting every star. A wisp of a Moon

is your ally, a pale Chalice tipped over spilling

Blackness into Twilight, as the sapless wych elm,

its brittle branches everting

as a dragon’s maw, thirsts for a vapourous sliver

of the eternity between sleep and quietus.

Beneath your lintel, laughter lulls into

solemn sighing, words, into a crypt of whispers;

sparkling orbs dim to catacombs.

Are you unnamed or nameless? Are you a Moment

or an Aeon framed in Life or Death?

Would you rest as a Gravestone or lead as a Portal,

restrain as a Threshold or preserve as a Bound?

 

Grey mists rise to meet the Hour as grim invocations,

these mute calls to your ancient Peers.

Do you now sit in judgement of a wayward wight,

a mere arc within an infinite Spiral,

plotting a turn of the screw for one fated to tread

timeless spaces? A Sign from a Sky

traced my course to your tenebrous domain, for I was

born with a veil, fated to see beyond my sight;

I have lived and thriven in the realms of your Night

that wove its shades into the minutiae

of my being. I imbibed its miasma as your World

splintered into dark and darker,

darkening further, fragment enfolding ashen fragment,

even as you lurked in Creation’s shadows.

 

I communed with tomorrows as you devoured todays,

willing myself back to the Child I was

in my quest for deliverance. I saw a Morning blossom,

a garden of breaths and dreams; plumed throngs

and birdsong lifted the air; a Mind without a Memory

pulsed, chronicling the constant Now,

no more circumscribed by its forbears’ sorrowing.

A sallow gleam crept over your shoulder as a portent

of some unknown distemper. Did you quaver

or quail, great Overlord? Such shall remain beyond

my ken, for my Eye shone a violet Path

growing through Wonder into the balmy blue Horizon.

I discern you now, holding sway in a borderland,

diminished, yet aglow with new Reflection and Dawn.

 

© 2020 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

‘Portal’ thematises collective liminal spaces as depicted in BTS’s works  over the years.

In 2020, a year that seemed eternally liminal, humankind’s endless rite of passage, I hoped to portray the ambiguous relationship several might have to such spaces that at once liberate one and engross a part of one’s journey. One specific representation left an indelible impression on me - the red residue-encrusted white door frame in the ‘Interlude: Shadow’ MV. It seems a particularly poignant rendering of a painful truth: That which enables transition and bestows access to new environs also erodes both corpus and psyche.

The protagonist in this piece addresses the Portal, the doorway to a sumptuous dwelling, with a blend of awe, mystification and resentment. This emotional reckoning culminates in insight and compassion. I cherish the hope that humanity will eventually come to look upon these fraught times as gently.

Images: twitter.com (@BigHitEnt)

FOR YOONGI

BURN

 

“I feel so nice, mom, I feel so nice…”

Who could tell where

soul ends and song begins?

 

A child’s spirit spoke his heart in an

ageless tongue that tunes

time’s eternal pulse, its vibrations

stirring a universe into musing,

into longing for the flame

that pulled its vortices and sparked

its animating force.

 

His echoes unlocked terror from my

air and wove a sky of hope,

awakening me to the particularity of

a world I had coloured

in shades of grey, tearing me from

my blanket skin and

the warmth of refulgent falsehoods

illusions of continuity

made fecund and green.

 

I felled every tree, razed the baneful

forest within, led by love,

by an iron hand in a velvet glove that

drew me from the depths

of my fears, raising me to a summit

of illumination, to a mirror of tears.

 

You mould language into a mouth or

blade, severing cords that

no more serve; braid it into strings,

into ropes to snare fragments

and cinders from falling stars, these to

kindle into fires of moon and dawn

like the indigo blaze that

powers your core.

 

You become the eye, the ray, the vision,

the knowing that light will come.

And we burn through days tinged blue,

inseparable as mountain and valley,

returning to breath and being

as you reap the music of the spheres.

 

Our ashes shall pave the causeway to our

innocence, to your childhood invocation.

“I feel so nice, mom, I feel so nice…”

#SonOfMyHeart

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Lyrics to BTS’s ‘First Love’ from the Album WINGS: YOU NEVER WALK ALONE - Written by SUGA, Miss Kay

Image 1: twitter.com

Image 2: commons.wikimedia.org

 

FOR YOONGI

FOREVERLAND

 

Music’s soul, her favoured scion and archivist,

keeper of her Golden Key,

your melodies flow like silver blood through

the earth of Time into the Heart of Life’s Tree.

Yet you war within,

darting as a wingless Angel through

the primordial Force that seeks to crown you

as though it were a dissembling adversary

or some inscrutable mystery.

Wistful whorls, fractals of fulminating grey,

pervade a sky of your own making,

one that ballasts itself, for it was fated to reign,

to rain spangled indigo into parched ages.

It casts you this bruised spell

as a raging water spirit conjuring storms from

dark whirlpools of your unquietus.

Yet you rest in its eye, for you grasp its meridian,

your spirals interpenetrating

though apart, its fabric textured as your quill,

its striations the hue of your ink.

You are as the infinite mind that is the

womb of universes, as the weather maker who

hears a harp on the wind.

In your tempest, you find salvation,

deepening yourself in darkness, defining your

affinity even as you yearn

for wholeness, for completion, merging with

realmless, fathomless truths,

blessing a dream on its way. The power of your

story upraises on wings of light

sprung from the egg of a clear moment amid

sable clouds, shifting the veil,

remaking my senses into Memory’s River whose

song tells of the season I beheld you

from a different star.

Wait by the unchanging Moon with a blossoming

tune, as she reads you verses

from her Tome, pausing to gaze upon you

or turn a page of night,

her eyes abrim with the beauty you live

and breathe. Her radiance shall draw your words;

rhymes and rhythms wandering your being

shall gather about her brow as a halo, that you may

know these lost fragments of your self,

Child of Foreverland.

#SonOfMyHeart

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com