I slid through the gap and into a spiraling whirlpool,
landed inside the gray with a nauseous splash.
Trees stood stripped of dignity, shuddering in the twilight
of winter, naked but broiling with torturous stakes.
As branches drowned in the wake of death their fingers pointed
through ripples pungent with sulfur and blue, bruised blood.
Shock took captive my slipping heart, which spluttered against the
ominous fog creeping in to steal my good eye.
Resurrection
On this page I recreate history
from the remnants of childhood –
This keyboard grows smooth with jabbering fingers
tapping the fear and wonder –
My screen glows white from the heat of knowledge
lighting the hidden shadows –
And free from the net that strangled my spirit
I resurrect Her wild past.
Magic Words – Nineteen
“With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.”
(Desiderata: Max Ehrmann)
The Mystica
In solitary non-compliant places
the Mystica rise
against the gravitational tug of nature
thwarting mortal will.
Gnarly limbs that grasp into consciousness
press the rub of time.
Their fingers grapple the swollen currents –
blasted and empty –
swimming away from treacherous sandbanks,
unchecked by any tide.
A mysterious spell-binding graciousness
captivates the eye
and highlights the worn skeletal echoing
of constant pressure.
Their branches lie bare of verdant feathering
yet will bloom again
as they wrestle the constant drownings that
sap land-locked spirits.
Look! Out of even dead apparitions spring
promises of fresh life.
The Lancashire Witches
by Carol Ann Duffy
(Read by Dan Thorpe)
Check out the official poem written to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Lancashire Witch Trials by Britain’s Poet Laureate
And the pearly moon
smiled
one sliver of glee as the shell tones
of day-play
dissolved to a smudge
on a fading
horizon of ink.
Then she pulsed to the
spangling
words of –
“So mote it be.”
Only the roar prevailed
against timely erosions
which puckered
the skin at the edge
of the gnawing ebb,
discharging on the shoreline
its useless,
unwholesome, and dead.
