Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Why was she drawn to the garden at nightfall? So small, barely past toddlerhood, she would slip out after dinner, while the adults were occupied with washing up, or talking in their incomprehensible way over wine glasses. Free of the house, she wandered amongst the plants at ease. Lilies waved about her head, their scent heavy, intoxicating, full of a looming sensuality she had no words for yet. Rose canes towered above her, a veritable cathedral of thorns. She knew better than to touch them but always did, finding the small prickly catch against her skin oddly pleasing; she admired the thorns, curved, crimson tipped. She loved to touch the furry silver leaves of lamb's ears, or the pale dusty fronds of the artemisia. Bent over the carnations, she gently stroked their ruffled petals and inhaled their fragrance. Small stones shone in the fading light, and sometimes a moth would waver by.

She never had more than a few minutes to herself in her green kingdom. Always after a short interval, she would be missed and sought. Her mother grew many things in the garden besides beautiful blossoms and table herbs---there were other plants grown for medicines and charms, and some were not safe for inquisitive hands and mouths. Before the twilight gave way to night, down the path would come her mother, or old Beata from the kitchen, to fetch her back inside.

She loved the garden just as much in winter as in summer. Her mother would suffer no cutting back of stems or dried leaves, insisting the withered leaves be left with their seed-heads and tangled sticks for the comfort of the birds and insects. In the winter garden, she learned different lessons than the lush ones of summer, but no less important. The structures of things laid bare by frost, and the frost itself, enchanted her. She loved to see it all glittering in moonlight, in her stolen moments there.

Her mother had told her the names of all the plants, and sometimes she would murmur them to herself in a sort of song or poem as she moved from one to another: carnation, lily, lily, rose... For her fifth birthday, her mother and Beata strung lanterns from tree to tree, and let her have her cake in the dusky garden, and she delighted in the glowing globes transforming her favourite place with golden light. Light in darkness, the names of things, the knowing of a plant by its scent or touch---so many small magics came to her in the garden.

And in the garden she learned about the immortal cycles of life, seeing through the seasons the transformation of things: how a bud became a flower, how a flower gave way to fruit or hip, and that to seed, and then the seed's long sleep in earth, and its shooting forth into the sun again. All things she watched intently, with a wordless wonder, and her mother watched her through the windows, filled with both wonder and grief at all that lay before her girl.

in tenebris

no government anymore
but this slick circus
come one, come all,
see the treacherous,
rump-fed runions baying
at the ragged remnants
of democracy, equality,
and any decency

hidden hands twitch strings
that pull a jerky dance
from the clueless or corrupt,
an ever-changing cabinet of maggots,
a charivari whose kettle-drumming
conceals their deeper work
of long-wrought
unravelling and rot

at the head of the parade,
Trumpkin in harlequin livery
happily capers and scrapes
at the gates of hell
gibbering, leering puppet-fool
fanning ancient hates and
peddling Soviet-era snake oil
to the red-hatted rubes

and little sick Pence none-the-richer
who, despite his pious posturing,
strokes golden calves and
tucks into his trundle nightly
under satan's brassy bed
where he dreams of mommy,
and the simpler times
of nursery rules and tales

and muckle mite Mitch,
soft-shelled, soft-spoken, purse-lipped,
un-pinnable, slippery swamp thing
whose whole-cloth lies and strategic evasions
should raise hackles on any hearer
yet somehow he always slithers through
unscathed, while the wickedness he works
goes off without a hitch

so the sorry sideshow goes,
circus wagons circled 'round an evil bonfire
made of the disrespected bones of the dead
and the dreams of the living
we have forgotten who we are, were, and should have been,
listening to idiots' tales, 

full of sound-bytes and fury,

dignifying nothing.

her working title

too bright the light,
too hot the sun,
and the wind too harsh,
and yet i crave to visit the desert

my back and legs are weak,
i cannot climb, and yet
the mountains call to me

i love the moon
in every phase and face,
and the stars i love,
yet rarely do i wake
and walk out to see them

i am old and young together,
i am wise and foolish both
i know my heart and head,
my motives and my fears,
but not how i came to be
so contradictory

unless all women are so,
un-simple, perversely whole,
defiantly humble
and entreatingly arrogant,
multiplicious,
conciliatory and unrepentant

though i think not.
i have met few as free as i feel,
if many freer in fact
am i gently fierce
or fiercely gentle?

inside my chest
beats a kernel of truth
fed and steadied
by a nameless flame
a fox-fire flicker
that can rise
in a consuming flash

and you,
who hold at times my body,
do you think you know me?

in all my tides and flames,
my pomegranate womb
and fire-seeded heart,
my ever-tender hands,
skinless shivering soul,
unwearying curiosity,
eyes china blue, sea blue,
my rapunzel hair,
appetites and aversions,
aching bones,
precise speech, long silences,
thread bridges thrown
across chasms of breakage,
do you know what you hold?

how could you know
more than i know of me?
we fear the fire,
and that will have to be enough.

pleading the 4th

Free Ride

When she was young, and everything seemed too much, she could go out to the paddock and catch the pony, and go riding... It felt as if the horse understood her feeling of needing to get away, to go so swiftly that the wind of their passage blew away all thoughts, and the rocking motion of their galloping was all there was to feel. Fields and meadows stretched out before them, fences were left behind, nothing mattered but their united desire to run fast and far and free.

It helped. Returning more slowly, they were both calmer. The shared joy of their flight was rounded out by a shared gentling down with the grooming, and the handful of sweetcorn or crimped oats given with grateful love; before she returned to the house, to the crumpled school uniform needing to be hung up for tomorrow, the latch-key child's solitary tea, and donning the armour of a decent frock for dinner.

As an adult, with no horse, she pined for a freedom like those childhood rides. She bought a bicycle, with the idea of riding it swiftly down the country roads, but it didn't feel the same. There was no shared flight, no sense of being one with a stronger creature who could carry her away from everything. And there were too many cars on the little roads now, housing estates popping up like great unwholesome fungi in every field and meadow, sometimes men whistling and shouting from their cars as she went by. She came home tired but not made whole. The bicycle gathered dust in the garage, and her dreams were filled with horses, with flight, with unbounded skies.

green

all around me is green
and it is raining,
and there are even roses
on the one precious bush.
i am trying to let the rain
wash my heart
and do the crying for me.
i hold a wet rose to my face
to remember what hope smells like,
what love feels like.
i was shaped not for faith
perhaps, but for continuing
in its absence.
green is the colour of hope
they say, but i believe
it is the colour of enduring,
of beginning again
and again and again
despite it all.

Making Peace

The light shone through the broderie Anglaise hem of the woman's dress and made a string of flower shaped shadows on her ankles, twinkling like stars as she walked slowly down the path to the sea. Her braided hair hung and swayed at her back, still golden, or hiding any silver strands amongst the ruddy blond. Watching as she walked behind, Runa thought for the hundreth time how beautiful her mother was still, how gracefully she moved. More than just surface beauty, too; her mother was one of the kindest, gentlest people she'd ever known. Apart from a few thorny years in early adolescence, Runa had always been very close to her mother, and wondered how her father could have looked anywhere but at his wife. She was too young yet to know how fickle hearts can be, and how desire may die when its object sits at the breakfast table daily, or how a man may be filled with jealousy when a child's needs are met ahead of his. She was also too young to understand how broken people break others, or the costs and sacrifices that keeping home tranquil could require. Life was quieter when he left, and no less rich for there being less money. Her pale mother shunned the sun during the day, but sunset on the beach was a ritual she kept every fair evening that she could. They dined at sundown year 'round because of this, and when Runa was little, she had found it magical how elastic time was in their home compared to the clock-driven hours of other people's lives. This evening, the air was soft, nearly windless, and the waves regular and low. They stayed until the colours faded to indigo above the sea, and turned for home as the first stars began to dance behind the dunes. The house lights beckoned, and they moved homeward in a deep and wordless peace. From this place, she went out into the greater world to school or work, but it drew her gladly back and knitted up any sorrows or perplexity. Whatever hard bargains or blood offerings had been made to keep its warmth and calm, it was worth it. The space held and soothed her like an extension of her mother's arms, which in many senses it was. She was only just beginning to suspect that peace was an everyday work, a sustained focus on what mattered most. It seeded in the heart, was tended carefully, and flowered with no less devotion than a garden needed.