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LOVEFIELD

 

Take us to the sky!

 

A stage raises you, that fragment of

God spinning like the Sun,

like the Cosmos you praise and sing,

circling into a violet spell,

a poem of forever birth.

 

I feel Time breathe in my bones and

notes flutter like stars

beneath my skin.

 

Purple’s roots are blood;

its arms reach into the blue – aether,

arc of water, abode of air,

all that merges into your pulsing

crimson loam to spark

string, air and drum into life.

 

Take us through the sky!

 

Piano chords tremble like hunger;

I cannot tell if your fingers

drip sweat or tears, only that you make

peace your own by giving of it,

by whirling out of accord

with the storm.

 

Brokenness rhythmised calls to wholeness.

Eyes join hearts.

Rhymes bind schisms.

Phrases gather sound in ears, trailing silver

through deserts, seas, years.

 

Feet of stardust leave footprints of gold

across a celestial lovefield.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: Screenshot from BangBangCon 2021 (@BIGHIT_MUSIC)

SPRING DAY

BUD

 

A Tree gives forth a Bud.

 

Somewhere, somewhen dreams hold

April’s child as she draws

circles in the grass around herself

with the green spearpoint

of a Branch bleeding palest pink froth…

 

A fragile defiance marks her bearing,

her twirling dance of framing

a fragment of blossoming spacetime,

of claiming a moment or

Season that slows to mirror her steps.

 

A Tree fells a Bud.

 

Lost Springs mingle with the salt in my

blood, circling into strands

deeper and stronger than those that

wove our life threads and the

pulsing passage of breath and warmth

that binds our mutual making.

 

Fingers reach through the years into our

forever Hour to catch its light

that glides over our hair,

gilding the fragrant air into an aureole

that keeps our paradise.

 

A Tree fails a Bud.

 

Memory whitens into the past; its elation

dims. Its silence pervades her

scentless clothes and waiting hairbrush.

Reality floats…or fades.

The eye is an insufficient anchor and

bridge through Time.

 

They tell of gravitational waves, listening

for reflected sounds of the

ancient Universe, the everywhere,

everywhen music of cosmic dust and

starbirth that paints into wholeness what

vision construes past light-years.

 

The Branch shall not fail the Bud.

 

I muster our echoes to colour our dreams,

that my soul may rise through

desolation into a higher pain, to your plane,

where Branch and Bud meet

in their forever Hour.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: LITTLE GIRL BALLERINA IN FLOWERS, DREAMING

Artist: Kimberly A.P.

Source: saatchiart.com

SPRING DAY

SEVEN

 

To what larcenous star are you now bound,

child of stolen Blossoms?

 

It took my dreams of you in some mystical

stroke of soul-sculpting beneficence;

its blazing beams shattered

my compass, bent my axis into a frozen sea,

rendering me a wintering tree.

 

Long sorrow is mine like the missing hour or

mouldering shrine that

no more call to the flame.

 

I tread water.

 

I waded between states into a livid mist with

the shadow of a lost voice for

my only tether.

 

I drowned every season in a tideless ocean till

I lay fettered to its floor,

destitute of all colour.

 

I defined your absence. I forged its void into a

presence, a blade stark as life’s

bitterest realities, that drew black fire from my

mutinying veins even as I

birthed its angles with smites of my pulse,

ground its lines mercilessly sharp

with the belt of my nerves stretched atom thin.

 

Its hyperreal art breathes, bonded with my flesh,

beating with my blood.

It impales my depths like a breakwater,

yet does not shield my spirit’s shores.

 

Time’s boughs hang heavy with my bestowals

of names and nameless nothings;

breathless non-verse and a wordless script of

forever snow born deep in my bones;

the discord of feeling and sequence that

subsumed me in its frosty mire.

 

I am empty of meaning and become a metaphor.

 

This April dawn found me in the heart of silence,

this most eloquent of seers,

amid dark rocks, playthings of winds and

breakers arrayed like shards

of a wreck or fragmented vignettes of the Spring

day you sang to seagulls

under a blue haze they call sky.

 

I now hold an image of the hands I protected and

memories of all they will never make.

 

The cove curves like an ear, the horizon raises a

veiled blue eyelid;

the air shifts - I am the watched and the heeded,

far for a spell from shakenness

and grey oblivion, from the miscreation

of my wearied mind.

 

A wisp of a breeze whispers around a lonely pile

by the waking brine,

around seven pebbles flat as the cloud filtered

light stacked like years,

in reverence to a single bloom

atop its austere craft.

 

And I perceive all emerge and merge with sudden

acuity under a rising sun of knowing

that drapes the waves that dance with your feet.

Life moves between love and wisdom,

between arcane and incomplex, each element

a vehicle for meaningfulness.

 

A trembling, a gossamer shivering on my cold lap

in the windless calm ruptures

the moment’s chrysalis. A winged flower awakens

amid brightening cherry blossoms I shall

scatter into your eternity, so palely translucent…

(like moonlight…like your hands…)

as to seem almost insubstantial.

 

White-veined petals flutter…skim across circles of

yellow satin…ascend with morning

as though to pass into another sphere…

 

Could I garden the petrified loam within, unearth

an evergreen wish, that I may journey

to our strength, into Springs you shall see

through my eyes?

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com  (Credit to the Original Artist)

WORD III

 

A child imagined words as valleys

where time exists as

pure sound.

Ideals, idylls, into which she would

sink, assured of corbels

and ballast.

 

They now seem like florets the wind

whips away,

a welcome splash of light…

…or an old attic door creaking on its

rusty hinges clamouring

for the ease

of unctuous, sinuous tones.

 

A blank leaf before silent ineptitude is

gravity, an inexorable force

pulling words from me

when neither will

nor spirit warm to inspiration.

 

They slide down my brow, gentle as a

landslip, yet constant

and compelling as the clock’s hands

holding my heart,

heedless of my rhythm’s 

timescale and fear-locked fingers.

 

I wrap their living filigree around vision

and feeling like flesh around souls.

I float on my tears,

stupefied

with the heady belief of creation,

bedevilled and anguished

by a tyrant Muse.

 

Benumbed. By hubris.

 

Stripped down to skin and bone.

 

Ridden with the relief and bereftness of

giving birth.

 

Illuminated.

 

Unsated.

 

For words gaze with a knowing that rises

like a star beyond all they say.

I peel back their layers,

reach into their grain that feeds essence,

stumble through strangleholds

and morasses

toward the core of unspoken sense that

awakens more than is perceived.

 

What language could trace the mystical

path of meaning into the marrow

of being?

 

Are words not more than thought and

sentiment made manifest?

 

By what higher art do import and truth

in tongues yet unknown,

unheard, shake the blood into stillness

or newer flowing;

split the continuum of time to render

me more real to myself?

 

I must return to the child,

become the page…let the Strand ravel…

or unravel in its spaces.

Life wings as a blink.

I pass into a different Eye.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: CHILD WITH A DOVE

Artist: Pablo Picasso

Source: twitter.com

STAR KIN II

 

Speak a starlit River beneath Twilight gathering,

Pearl of our age whose vision

leaps from Adhara’s violet-blue nacre!

The weight of doing erodes purpose; I ask Sirius

what I truly desire. Would I choose

toil or idleness, entanglement or emptiness?

Would I measure myself as

word and voice or surrender before the Radiance

that reigns beyond all thought

and struck sound?

 

My sister labours toward Light past every instant

of indeterminacy; she walks through Fire,

passes through densest bodiliness to the reflection

of the Cosmos’ sovereign point

within to stand as a stranger before herself,

hollowed, dismembered,

made a sanctum for stillness and silent awareness,

the worthiest receptacle for

the pure Flame of timeless harmony.

 

I stray through ancient holloways into deep woods

along the pilgrim’s path into

my highest organ of consciousness that awakens

me to each rise and fall of

the Universe’s tides. I seek answers in the wistful

urgency of gasping gales and

green breath; my lungs are my anchor and centre.

Is not the body the learning device

for the Soul – mine would be an oak – and action

the final bridge between substance and Spirit?

 

You walk the fields with clods of earth in your hands,

for the ground is a Poet

who versifies in lavender and humus.

You contemplate a pebble that it may lead you to

the pulse of the mountain,

to the domain where dualities fall away, for such is

deeper than the mind and

immense as all that ever beat to Creation’s rhythm.

Illumination beckons to you through

materia’s knowing as the transparent silver of Time.

 

Your song chimes like starbirth incarnating in moment,

heart and eye; sparkling tones irradiate

the night. Meaning renews itself and peace lightens

the land’s burden.

 

“Being is every step of and toward eternal becoming.” 

 

Yet I am a storm. I breathe and rage as penance and

prayer for my inner rewilding.

I have too many tears I would transform into poems,

paths and maps. My life must wait yet

to be served by rest.

I shall keep with me the memory of a dream where I

walked with our tribe and the journey

wove my feet. My questions to tomorrow’s suns

I leave in your keeping.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: significados.com

WORD II

 

A shell lives in my mind, uncompanioned as I.

 

Feeling does not figure design into fruition on

pale, windless afternoons

when the sun dyes everything flat and blind

with every dapple sat squat

between mushroom-grey blots like

an undistinguished star.

 

Twilight cast my eyes from a Dark Moon and

Polaris’ vigil, yet my ear tends

toward strands that seam pinnate patches

of taupe and fallen night jasmine

beneath the silence of trees surfeited with day.

 

“Is it a motionless stillness?”, I whisper over

plains I tend and ravage with

serein and hailstorms.

“It unfolds like wind-blown water or the sigh of

an awakening soul sliding across

time’s canvas to the blueness that knows

all as one great body.”

 

Wonder renders the strange known, the familiar

a mystery. The perfected of humanity

venture unbodied on its pinions along the spirit’s

range, chanting an elemental prayer

that echoes in its valleys as the wordless Word

that limns the symbol of eternity,

the unperceived sigil permeating all that

the senses perceive.

 

Wrapped in starlight, I follow its reverberation that

leads to the picture pulsing within thought.

 

Awe raises every mote to a miracle.

 

The opposite of loneliness is the music of ancient

stones…or a walk through moonlit clouds.

 

I am no more earth-weary; my will to breathe is a

white luminescence that shall

outlive its source. Rapture is my umbilicus, corded

to the marrow of eternal rebirth.

 

I am curled tight, infolded as a foetus in the shade,

throbbing as a heart,

listening to the soundless blood of leafed shadows.

 

I am feral, bent, a thing of fangs and fire, as I seek

to write the bridge between meaning and being.  

 

Yet all I can birth is a memorial for thought beyond

its own illusion, for dying I did not cherish

and wombs I forsook. Is such my redemption?

 

A shell opens in my mind, releasing the pearl of Sky.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: NGC 1977

Source: nl.m.wikipedia.org

 

WORD

 

The ceiling billows like a god-struck gale.

Silver bats hang from black rafters.

 

I hear them through water.

 

Gone are all my dreams of periwinkle blue.

I am cold in my chrysalis;

colder still is the unknowing before

second sight…

and the Dark Moon musing across night.

 

I was born from burns, of burns…

Seeing is not a salve.

Brown orreries break,

darker brown ringed rays - not light -

they named for a flower tear, tear. Scald.

Quill? - Lash.

Scald through the caul…after the caul.

 

My skin flakes in pages.

 

I hunger for words and painted hymns!

My belly is taut with verbs.

I need more than mere mouthfuls.

Time is place and place is time.

All is song seeking a voice, a beginning.

My omentum is my omphalos, 

my litany,

my amen.

 

I shadow descriptors and stalk metaphors,

silent as a spectre, bright with the hunt

in my breath and blood.

My tongue lunges before me like a flame

to shallow the poison root

and deepen the eye. I am grown grasping

and frail with yearning for the Word

that would reconcile me with

Moon and invoke Sky.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: Fallen Pine at Hague Lake George (1929)

Artist: Harry Wilson Watrous

Source: twitter.com