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

 

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