I’ve been having vivid and strange dreams this week amidst restless sleep. The moon keeps me company.
sacred fools are neither
god nor angel
not secret not magic
open to joy
they remember the rhythms
of the vast universe–
how to dance like stars
flying wild inside the sky
if you listen to breath being born
you can awaken voices
air singing oceans through trees
healing the holes
in the broken heart of night
The Oracle knows all about the moon, fools, dreams, and night.
Another sleepless night. The Oracle knows.
where does sleep go?
is it running away with time
from my shadow?
I ask the stormy seas why
I swim through these black waters
please I sing rewind me
return me
to my lightship of dreams
Another mostly sleepless night. But the Oracle sees beauty in those hours too. And how else would I have seen the sliver of the moon?
And look closely on the right–there’s Saturn too.
who is this self
sailing slowly through the dark
always away
blue with haunted oceans
flying from the ghosts of time
breathless as the dance
of skyholes
lingering in starfire
awakening the open eyes
of this goodnight
the window reflects only me, but
I know that beyond, in the dark, the
branches cast their shadow
against the sky—a patterned whisper, a voice
like wrinkled wind. Outside is
far away from the artificial glitter of a
wire-wrapped tree, sparkling a mere
imitation of stars, pretending to echo in a vibration
of what the night has to say—the messages passed amongst
the members of the nocturnal choir. The
listening of the landscape requires attention—the trees’
murmuring, air displaced by invisible wings, thin
threads woven in soundwebs—stillness shivering the leaves.
A golden shovel poem for the dVerse prompt from Peter for endings. I’ve used a line from M L Smoker’s poem “Mercy”–a source for a number of pages of writing in my journal.
“But the shadow voice is a mere vibration amongst the trees’ thin leaves.”
–M L Smoker, Mercy
“Darkness came, full of moths and beetles. I was oppressed by the velvety emptiness of the word and swathes of soft grass. Then the fumes of the night put me to sleep” (Laurie Lee, As I walked out one Midsummer morning)
My mind becomes oppressed inside the dark–
words grow legs and wings like strange balloons–
uncaptured outlines, creatures of the night,
with shadows leaving trails of lost perfumes.
I wander through the absence, the unfull,
the forest of this opposite of me–
as midnight swathes with clouds of emptiness,
my wraiths go searching for a place to sleep.
Laura at dVerse introduced us to poet Laurie Lee. She asked us to use one of his quotes as inspiration, perhaps for a quatrain with a rhyme of ABCB.
K. 