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

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

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

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

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

Source: http://19thcenturyrusspaint.blogspot.com

Artist: Ivan Aivazovsky

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

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

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

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

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