A sea-sky answers
heaven’s distant flame,
And I am named by you,
as you by me are named.
As sea-sourced mists through heather-darkness spills,
And finds each hollow of the dreaming hills,
So you, precious one, do saturate my soul;
Two separate seascapes merged to make one ocean whole.
#vss365
Around these stones, the hidden jewel of hope lies still, not gone;
For what seems buried in our grief keeps an eternity in dawn.
#vss365
The stone remembers
every winter’s march,
and moss
grows tender
where the dark
is showing,
Our souls pass timid
through a sacred arch,
but few
can name the thing
that keeps
us going.
#vss365
no roots drive deep, yet still
it will outlast
the iron gate, the oak,
the river’s banks,
for it requires so little
of the world,
and so the world, in time,
gives all it has.
2/2
Moss Covers All
~~~
Beneath the timid light
of fading stone,
where carved ambitions blur
to softer seams,
the moss lays down its velvet,
nerve by nerve,
and drinks the names of kings
like morning streams.
1/2
#vss365
Remembering Autumn
~~~~
The trees released
what they couldn’t hold,
and in that letting,
turned to living gold.
~~~~
So I have learned to breathe like winter trees
That stand in frozen vigil, bare and bright,
Their silver branches lifted by degrees
As prayers are given softly into night.
The oak
does not implore
the soil for haste
But sends
its roots through
dark and wordless years,
A silent quest
with nothing
run to waste.
#vss365
in my ribs
your laughter reigns,
a swan-bone flute
the wind plays
just to hear.
I lay my ear to stone and beg it for relief
Beneath the sloe-bough, when the last birds thin to air,
I hold your hand as if it were a small, warm shore.
A snowdrop,
Love,
that stoops as if
to pray beneath the snow,
Prove of Love’s
metaphysics:
it falls,
yet ever grows.
What crazed the light
has silvered
into prayer;
the water’s argument
with heaven,
unresolved.
The air changes
to salt, and
salt to air,
and all the churning
deep is
somehow
absolved.
#vss365
As blatant Day
doth blind the
stars from sight,
So Love’s loud flame
doth dim all
lesser light.
#vss365
If light returns, oh, find me altered, scarred,
Not healed, but standing where the storm has been;
A tree made fierce by every night it’s marred,
Still leafing hope through bark grown hard and thin.
~~~
Strength is survival,
not recovery.
~~~
4/4
So I became the branch that will not break,
Though ice makes glass of every tender vein;
I hold the birds whose wings began to ache,
And warm their flight with my enduring pain.
3/4
I hate the grief that will not loose its hold,
A tide that turns but won’t leave my memory;
For bones remember tempests long grown old:
Strength is survival, not recovery.
2/4
SEE MY GRIEF
~~~~~~~~~~~
Beneath the frost-unfastened yew I stood,
Where dawn unstitched the night with threads of pale,
And felt my sorrow root like winter wood
Whose sap runs slow when gentler seasons fail.
#vss365
1/4
My heart, when scourged
by fear, grows
winter-pale,
Yet finds a summer
in Thy
gentle breath;
Thy cross becomes
my raft through
fear’s dark hail,
A saving vessel
sailing
over death
Where drowning fears
rise crowned in
living faith.
#vss365
The pale moon pulls
both tide and
soul to prayer;
God’s silver hook
that draws me
from despair.
#vss365
My pale hands, once
baptised in salt and spray,
Now clutch at dust;
O what a fool was I
To think God’s temple
stood in fields of clay!
The sea was Scripture
writ with giving eye:
Lord, drown my pride,
let me by the sea lie.
#vss365
My blood beats green
through vein and bone,
Each pulse the proof
I’m not alone.
Inside I taste
the hawthorn’s thorn,
Life breathing life
till life is worn.
#vss365
My blood (once wild
as rivers
swollen full
with spring’s allure)
will course through
channels straight!
No more my heart’s
soft moon will
wax and pull
my tides to rock.
He is a
wolf in wool,
A nightshade fruit
As sweet as
heaven’s gate
Here is my heart,
a
hungering
fool.
#vss365
From His bright wound
the living waters rise,
And wash the dust
where my dark gardens lay;
The thorn once crowned
upon His sacred brows
Now flowers as light
along my hidden way.
Let every leaf
that
stirs
in wind and rain
turn green
in spring
with praise.
#vss365
I write
no more
of wounds;
My pen turns thorn
each time I near their seams
And creatures scratch
against the margins
of my dreams.
#vss365
Soul Pain
~~~~~~~
The body’s wound
may bind with
herb and clay,
But soul-torn gardens
lie beyond the sun.
No mortal salve
can touch that
withered way
Where thorns grow inwards
till the heart is done.
#vss365
~~~
As roots entwine
beneath the oak unseen,
And life ascends
where two trunks fuse as one,
So soul meets soul
in spaces in between
Where otherworldly logic
joins the moon and sun.
~~~
So love’s soft story proves that Death is Life become.
~~~
#vss365
When dawn breaks cold upon the frost-touched rose,
And petals hold the shadow
of
the
night,
Two souls, like rivers meeting, interpose.
#vss365
