BREATHE II

 

Last year this time

 

No strawberry aisles

or mango miles…

 

…Only a turning into

your lungs,

into an emissary

of air,

an unpresent witness

to fire battling

water

 

And light’s

iron muteness

 

Upon a confluence of

wayward

salt streams

lit by copper, marigolds

and ashes.

 

This year…

 

…no no strawberry aisles

no no mango miles.

 

“Two negatives make

a positive.”

 

A nameless non-sound

descends

into

the hour.

 

Is it the peace

of healing or the calm

before disquiet?

 

Ashen jasmine,

fading firefly trails…

 

Do two absences make

a meeting, father?

 

I hear the sky breathing.

 

© 2022 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com

FOR BTS

PROOF

 

Would I fear fire?

 

I am clothed in roaring flames,

blazing tongues

and golden beacons warding

the silent, eternal

revolution

within.

 

You and I are as Earth and Sky,

facing pages;

our song rises, a dust script,

a bridge from Home

to azure Home,

the faraway haze that shadows

and raises the ground

that makes us.

 

We plumb the mystery of loving;

Chimes echo the souls

of Winds they never hold;

Wintering Branches

write of Spring’s crystal depths

against a distant

blue Canvas, the seasonless

Season that enfolds all

but touches none.

 

We know a placeless place where

Song meets a Voice,

Proof of a Flower beyond the fire,

the one path to its perfume

through Flames

that curve violet around

the Universe.

 

© 2022 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: twitter.com

FOR BTS

PROLOGUE: YOUNG FOREVER

 

A spangled veil rises, a singing sky

that planted flaming stars

in my eye.

 

Silence rings, now a deviance in sound

my crown of blood once

made sterling.

 

It looks on me, that distant mirror of

moonlit blue infinity, sun-filled,

shadow-rilled.  

 

Forever’s ocean beckons my river of

years; flow meets flow at

the edge of the edge.

 

Eternity touches the earth, the of earth,

with the trembling certainty

of sea reflected in sea.

 

Pain refines faith. Is the artist not time’s

subject? The music’s seeker

is its noblest maker.

 

Go to wonder, to where memories leave,

breathing dream-lit petals

into wintering trees.

 

Unuttered thoughts are light and the air is

a voice that whispers of

coming comfort.

 

Knowing is mystery; questions make whole,

wordlessness illuminates,

lends substance.

 

Young eyes bare timeless tales; they know

the perils of thornless ways.

 

Forever eyes, find peace in the raging storm,

tumult, in safe harbour.

 

© 2022 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: @bts_bighit

Rest content...but not silent.

The fires you ate made of you

a diamond.

A furnace burns still...forging...

tempering...

Dreams turned to ashes in

your mouth.

Remembrance does not redeem.

Your bones beat a watery drum.

© 2022 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse 

A small infinity was placed on a hand.

Right.

To right.

I did not know that hand was mine;

it seemed a shadow I saw

in a dream.

Waiting is a continuum far from living.

Detached from knowing.

Even light must go the distance.

The star dies before it colours the eye.

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 STAR SEEKER

 

What could dredge a spark from

the deepest fathoms

of grief that crushes as it shapes?

 

I wept for the stopping of a pulse

and a pulsing,

the perishing of a Dream

that waited for Day.

 

I have built a house of Words

from that hour

of short breaths and

long moments.

Words that are now for Silences

that rupture the lung,

strung together so death may

come undone;

that this sentence may be

re-storied;

that the salt may be leached

from the ocean in

my throat.

 

Turn, Season!

Turn, Road!

Into the light they call hope;

through the space

between sentience and knowing

where flowers of Faith bloom,

withered petals rising

into a hymn.

 

The calm before the storm hulls

the sleeping shoot,

the flaming germ of tumult

that lends the Cosmos

its colours.

 

I sought distance to be nearer

Myself.

 

The phoenix does not burn

to its end.

 

This soul-forged Dark has a Star

for its shadow.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com

FOR YOONGI

UNIVERSE

 

You hold me as a Voice, one I speak of

with greater certainty

than I hear,

for you are made from the immense

unknown…or are you

the Immenseness of the Unknown?

I took you for dead, yet,

do the dead not write on living pages?

I see you without looking…

the sight of you once turned my eyes

to stone, as I stood on

the cliff of Time, ice and frozen tears

cascading like diamonds

into the valley of my lungs.

Wings grew into fetters…currentless,

iron echoes of what promised freedom.

 

I learned they are light in flight alone.

 

I am a pilgrim of distances and depths

whose torment is the choice

between knowing and understanding.

Would I know my voice

or construe the cadences of my Dream?

Shall I seek the poetry

of air and flesh or the dream that is me?

Much is made clear with each question,

yet the mystery deepens.

Such are answers.

 

The dream of a voice…

The voice of a dream…

 

Treasure the struggle! Let your breath

crown the air, your steps

garland the ground!

Anguish when thoughts are born

unbeknownst to your mind!

Gather moments and spaces unto you!

Enfold the Muse as she leads you to gold!

 

Wings…

I am not Icarus.

Mine is to soar past Suns.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

#SonOfMyHeart

Images: @magicshopbooks on twitter.com

13:51

 

Clock hands spanned a frozen umbel

in the silent air atremble

with their foregone momentum.

 

Minutes, vivid with desire for motion,

revenged like fireships

through fleets of memories

flailing on the dead sea of my mind,

their sailmaker and windcaller.

 

“Tick-tock, tick-tock”, its soft steel

snagged the arc

of the summer breeze that sought to

write its song on my skin.

 

I wandered between yesterday and

tomorrow’s wake,

carpeting the greening earth with my

parched veins, their blood

long since yielded to the interred hour

that passed before it could pass.

 

Its fruit incarnate in words that linger

as thought shadows

on my page, rimming the chill white

face that marked its broken

circle like a wreath.

 

And I must raise a litany of meaning

from the waterless colourless

amid yellow wagtails that once filled

my paling, failing heart

with their wingbeats.

 

To be perceived by you was freedom.

You glow in the half-light

as a spellmaker or liminal god

of the borderland between breath

and surrender.

 

We defy the eternal law of equals and

opposites; that hour is not lost to us,

though we are lost to it.

 

Light touches deeper than dark.

Such incompleteness is the new order.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Image: twitter.com

 

SOL INVICTUS

 

‘Invoice’ was the last word you

scrawled in your diary

that cruellest month, you Bell

wrought of Sun

sounded by a diamond tongue,

Comet-spirit blazing

into darkest nights of souls

breathing blooded prominences

of hope where stars lay prone.

Stilled, you burned still;

you said rest became you ill

and flamed untamed,

sparking, fulminating till that

most inexorable Tide

of all engulfed

your golden embers.

 

Vitals could neither measure nor

map your vital force

sparkling, purling, undiminished

through spacetime.

Red-vented bulbuls echo your

timbre; the Flame of the Forest

glows, glowers scarlet

through the monsoon’s vagaries.

I am locked into your lungs;

Air is now a shining thing,

streaming, shimmering

in unyielding jasmine clusters

budding like alveoli

this Solstice Day.

 

Rise into peace, father, my Light,

made forever gentle by

that last good night. Autumn’s child

shall somewhen take

your Eternal Summer

into her step. Her quill shall speak

in your voice.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

 

Images: pinterest.com

References: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

BREATHE

 

Emptiness gained sentience;

Darkness blossomed sight.

The one roars in my still ear;

the other rages before

my sleeping eye.

Pictures begin to fade into

silence

scrawled across midnight

where Adhara’s hymn

to Infinity once rained silver

over jewelled verse

you read to a child who

yearned for home.

We looked up to the skies

to learn the ground

on which we stood, father.

A wan harp string

of moonlight

weeps into the under-sky

that is my world.

Black stars of pain stud

the cassias rising

…so unthinkingly pulmonary…

through the windless grey.

“I love you…”,

“Thank you, child…”,

you uttered, as air no more

lifted life.

Much speaks that never spoke

before…or am I

an awakened audient?

Do you now know

what language was before

tongues came to be?

Return to me, my father,

as a word that

breathes.

 

© 2021 Lilium Candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: Moonlight view from Hammershus ruins on the island of Bornholm

Artist: Georg Emil Libert

Source: commons.wikimedia.org

FOR BTS

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