Geworfenheit

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I am tired of talk
                 of monsters and words
                                             that taste of rusted chains                                                                            
and snare
               this beautiful,
                                extraordinary world
                                                       with a noose of syllables and syntax

And of those who redefine
                                 my hope in words
                                                         that I cannot recognise or understand...


What strange creatures we are:

We find ourselves flung among darkness and stars
Adrift and alone on a spinning globe
in an Eden we think we've lost.
Is it not surprising that our dreams are of fire and light?


And we people our worlds with such gods and demons
That we scarce can tell them apart
                                          or know which to worship
                                                                         and which to fear

So we find patterns among our footprints
and music in wind-blown trees
and we begin to see significance in the lines of each palm
and read our future in the shadow of our past

And we mark our lives with cups of tea
or things more insubstantial and find small
words to reach across the empty space that separates us
So that, for one small moment, the night erupts with the
spun-gold light of our small suns.

'The gate at the end of the vicarage snicket was blocked by cows again this morning.'
'I won't be surprised if a spot of rain will be coming our way.'
'The clock is running a little fast today.'
'I'll see you tomorrow then, God willing...
                                                             ... God willing'

Our globe still spins its path through all that silent darkness.

Come, show me your god
                                         and I will show you
                                                                   your deepest fears.

Student Number 1002### (Apotheosis)

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There is a strand of hair that has worried
her all day. It was there when she
brushed it that morning, in the bathroom
mirror dripping with condensation, smelling
of bath-oil, tooth-paste, and damp walls.

She could see it in the rear-view mirror
of the car her nan leant her money to buy.
It's in every smeared reflection, even her
dulled shadow that follows her along the corridors
 that reek of bleach and urine. But no one else sees it.

All they see is the rain streaking the panes
and the nurse that is not really a nurse -
who calls gran 'me duck' - and the small hole
in the back of her tights where her shoe
has rubbed her heel red and sore.

The birds sing to the traffic and
the shuffling feet at the bus stop below,
and the relatives, sit beside the undrunk
beaker of cold tea, as awkward as adolescence,
and do not see that strand of hair, or the warmth
of her smile or how she quietly closes the door as she leaves.

And no one knows that on an afternoon like
this, of grey light and a hollow wind, that
for one moment, in a lecture theatre, she
shone with such brilliance that thoughts
crackled in the air and her words flamed
and flared around her head like comets
blazing in the night.

And, for a while, it was as if all the world
was black and she bathed those around
in the liquid, burning light of her questions
and the fire of her thoughts. And the lecturer
stood quietly, barefooted on hallowed
ground, entranced by the wonder
of such pure fire.

WOLF wind

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Under a sky, bruised and bloodied by the sun and cloud,
     there is a wolf wind that lurks and prowls through the wood;
     cruel... sly... and wicked.

The sheep don't seem to notice it, full of new-life - not yet born.
     Nor the bishop hare, as still as star light, eyeing me
     with the eyes of a prophet, from the long grassed verge
     that rolls its way to Oxhill.

Fractured puddles, spread like splintered flint shards
     the dust-hard track-ways that ring to the heel of a boot
     while down at the corner of Peacock Lane the wolf wind
     crouches, ready to pounce...

There's a grey light that blows from Nineveh, ocean cold
     and heavy; and trees, black stencilled, hag-haired and
     made arthritic by the seasons' turn, clutch and claw at the
     wild and restless sky.

Down by Banbury Road the rooks cling piratical
     to the bucking schooner of their branches,
     their sea legs steady, tending the new-life of their own
     and winging the fangs of the sly wolf wind.

THERE are NIGHTS like THIS...

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There are nights like this,
owl soft and hung
with sheep song, when
the larches on Sunrising
slant limb-wise on
westerly winds, that lying
here upon this mossy
backbone, scented with cow
and gorse and the cold wet
earth, I know with all certainty
that, unless I dig my fingers
deep into the knotted roots
of grass at my side, I would fall

Upwards into the blackness
of the sky, trailing cold
star-fire through my outstretched
fingers.

St MARY'S, Middle Tysoe

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The church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Middle Tysoe

Wood pigeons gather in the trees
about Church Farm and swifts
contemplate their flight, as late summer
light falls upon Jacobean pews
through watery Victorian glass.

Silence curls in the evening
air, clinging to the chancel
walls like the memory
of swung incense or the faith
of ploughmen; rough-hewn
from the rich red soil and grey rains
that give birth to the racking cough
and burning ague.

Beneath the stony gaze
of the Norman Horseman
and panting dog,
    God
    and
    I
sit opposite
each other,
eye to eye
toe to toe;
Job before his maker
(but which is which?).

                     We lay our complaints
before each other. Mine written in
guttering candlelight and the arrow
of a sparrow's short flight,
His written in Levantine dust
and the bitter taste of cheap red wine.

Together we survey the distance
between us and silently
wonder why.

I was BORN into a CATHEDRAL...

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I was born into a cathedral of green water and weeds and light. My small world was bordered by hedges and fields rich with cow dung and hollow dark places, rank with nettle and dock, where archangels and kingcups grew and I was cradled by the sound of wind among reeds; the rush of glassy water in the sluices of the locks; the song of swans' wings in flight; and the wash of rain against a wooden cabin roof. It smelt of wet wood and anthracite and the smell of hot iron from the little Pithers stove that kept the cruel winters at bay and dried the bedclothes when the roof leaked. And then there was the smell of pigs and straw and paraffin and the rich, trouty, earthiness of when still waters are stirred.

The Kathy, Grand Union Canal, Rickmansworth

There were five of us aboard this clinker-built ark, called the Kathy, cobbled together from an open-topped lifeboat that had been salvaged from an old liner. The wood was rotten, but loved. The farmer, on whose land, it was moored kept threatening to break it up, but Mum and Dad just laughed; it was home and it was a good one. There was laughter there and warmth, even when the ice came and our world no longer rocked gently to the secret rhythms and movements of the dark canal waters. There was a port-hole by our bunks and Mum made drop scones in an old frying pan for friends dropping by. There were always friends dropping by.

First there was Mum and Dad. Then there was a cat, Kismus - who (later) would sleep with me on my pram, then my sister, Wendy, came and finally there was me. At 9.45, on a Friday morning right at the end of a wet April; it was the day when the farm's guard dogs were silent, I was born in the little cabin made and fitted out by Dad. Dad and Wendy waited on the canal bank hoping that the rain would hold off. Kismus was the first of our family to see me. The midwife plucked her up, saying that it is only right that she should see this new creature that had come into her life so that her nose would not be put out of joint. Dad bought a marble cake to celebrate.

Dad (looking splendidly bohemian and piratical), Mum, me and Wendy

Records show that there was a long-lasting system of low pressure hanging over the country that spring which made it very wet. Much later, Mum was to write:

"One of the aspects we enjoyed most about the boat was the feeling of close proximity with the elements without actually having to go outside. When it rained we could hear it pattering on the roof, giving a very cosy feeling and the sight of the raindrops falling on the water making patterns was so much nicer than seeing them fall on cold town pavements. The same with the wind, when it blew there was the gentle rocking of the boat, with the added chuckling sound of the water against the clinker built sides." 

Space was tight and sometimes, of necessity, even in the rain I would be outside, in the fields by the bank, tucked up in the pram with Kismus - on guard - sitting under it. Later, once a week, a friend of Mum's would collect us in her dinghy, I would be in a carry cot placed in the centre, and then she would row us upstream, to where she lived, for tea and cake in a narrow boat that was moored around the willowed bend, where swans swam with their signets, and that smelt of rush matting and oil lamps.


What did I stare at?
What captured my mind (young as it was) and my heart in those moments?
And do those things still stir me deep within?
What pleasures did I feel with the rain brushing the canopy of my pram, safe and cocooned while the elms sighed and the heron flew?
Is this why I am still entranced by the sound of rain against window or hood?
Is this why I breathe a little deeper at the sight of rings forming on still waters?
Is this why I still like to press myself up in the corner where the roof eaves drop on stormy nights and listen... and listen?

The cosy warmth of a wooden cabin, the smell of a hot stove, the light that spills from a hurricane lamp, the sound of water lapping against a wooden hull, moorhens swimming through green seas of duckweed, gnats dancing low over water, the slow creak of oars complaining in their rowlocks, the smell of locks and the rattle as the winding gear is released, the white fall of water... These are not memories. They are too old to be memories, too forgotten, too lost; pre-memories, impressions, stabs of emotion, feelings gauze-thin like dreams in the morning's light. But they are somehow still part of me, as strange flashes of recognition that disorientate me and strip me bare. Yes they are still there, for I hear their songs and hear their owl-like call. Not to an Eden lost, but to an Eden that still lives.

TODAY i STOPPED the CLOCK and HELD back TIME

         

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            Today I stopped the parish clock
            and while the village slept,
            at the point where summer time
            falls back into winter,
            with one hand, I held back time      
            and let seconds fly
            directionless and  haphazard
            around the steepled tower,          
            like gnats dancing over a summer pond.
            The iron hands stood frozen
            to each moonish clock-face
            at five minutes-to the mute and silent hour.

       

Instead of rounded golden chimes
rolling out over field and rooftop
there was silence
and the pigeons in the bell chamber
slept on undisturbed.
And all I heard was the beating of the wind against the tower
as I rubbed shoulders with God and angels in this place beyond time.


                   For a while I watched the village slumber
                   from the unlatched door high up
                   on the side of the old stone tower.
                   A guardian of this time of no time.
                   The ticking watch on my wrist counted out the untrod
                   minutes upon which no one had yet walked...
                                ... or loved
                                          .... or danced.

                             In that silence,
                             I tasted each moment;
                             Those seconds,
                                      those minutes
                                               and precious quarter hours
                             that those below had yet to live.

Is this what it feels like to be God?

To be standing in the dark outside time?

Is this the eternity of which my soul dreams?

Where seconds are born 

 then slew back upon themselves

to be reborn later? 

Or is this just the world of the wilder things;
the fox, hare and badger?
Those that run as wild as wind
Unaware of the clock not ticking
Or the hands not moving.

                      For an hour, with one hand
                      I held back time
                      and set eternity loose
                      among the streets and alleyways.
                      And the village below me
                       slept on, unknowing.

And my eye travelled up
to the smudge of woodland
on a high brow of hill
Where eternity always breaks in.

* Background music composed, performed and recorded by Helen Ingram

WHEN we WALKED to THE wood

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I CANNOT QUITE REMEMBER
              SO TELL ME...

     The day we walked to the wood... And I followed your footsteps up the steep earthen path, cut by rain and as brown as nature's womb... and when, at the steepest places, you reached out and held onto the same trees that I too hold on to; their slender trunks, wet with dew and rain and life... and you said that you could smell autumn and it made you smile as autumn always does... and we listened to the silence and a rook's call and the sound of rain falling from leaf to leaf.

              ... BUT I know there was more...
                                                      SO much MORE...

Two people cannot share an hour in the woods without experiencing a lifetime brimming over with wonder and joy... and I want to remember and to savour every single moment...

               SO TELL ME...

DID the mist hang in the air like dragons' breath so that the tops of the larches touched a different sky?

DID the chimes from the village clock roll up the hills, as sweet as carols, as soulful as owls, as lethal as quicksilver, shimmering among the beech and sycamore until only the moles and the sleeping badgers could hear it?

DID the crows rake the skies with their ragged wings?

WERE your fingers wet with rain drops that hung like glass globes from each leaf and branch and blade?

DID we dance together to the ancient music that the trees sing? And if not, why not?

DID we really meet the hermit who lived in the brushwood shelter, who smoked a briar pipe, and who sang songs and brewed coffee too bitter to drink? And did we sit with him beside his fire to listen to stories of love and hope and of friendship that is greater than both, while badger cubs dozed between his feet?

WERE there pink mallow and yellow cats ear and wood aven that outshone the sun among those dying leaves?

DID we taste together blackberry and wild sorrel's bitter-lemon bite?

DID we stand together upon the cracked concrete of the old airfield, now welcomed back by the wood, and listen, among the mist and the dripping leaves to the crackle and hiss of wartime music and the thud of distant bombs and the sadnesses they bring?

WERE there crab apples and rose-hips and bread-and-cheese leaves, and did we run our fingers, crimson with blackberries, through willow-herb's matted beard?

WERE your scarlet paths aisled with Lords-and-ladies and around your throat did you wear black bryony's bloody necklace?

DID the clouds part and the sun pour down upon us honeyed warmth so we walked through a dappled landscape where Cain was unborn? And I marvelled at the chalk-blue sky and you blew upon a dandelion-clock that was a perfect sphere and feathered-time drifted from your lips and out over field and hedgerow where the soft-eyed cows grazed.

WERE the fields filled with crane flies that rose with each footfall and heralded our way with elven wings?

DID the wind turn and ravage the world with ice and snow so that your breath burned in warm clouds and your nose turned red? And did you say, "This is Narnia" and I replied, "Yes. And below us lies the valley of Huntercombe where the Walker and the Rider and King Arthur meet." But neither of us could feel anything malevolent about the friendly, dancing flakes.

DID I see joy and wonder in your eyes, darting and flaming like fireflies (though I was afraid to look too closely), so that I too could see the world as you see it?

WERE there Chinese lanterns glowing again like painted planets in the Rectory garden below us and was there an accordion playing and the sound of a woman singing beneath the Harvesters' Moon?

DID dragons come and play at your feet? And each tree limb burst into bloom? And golden leaves and butterflies cascade from the skies? And was the world filled with God's laughter?

Perhaps ALL... or perhaps just SOME of this really HAPPENED...

I cannot precisely remember...
                    So tell me about the day we walked to the woods
                           and I followed your footsteps up the steep earthen track...

On BELAS KNAP I sat down...

An old one, but a recent visit prompted me to post it here:

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Belas Knap (GLO1) lies on a gentle hill-slope overlooking a steep-sided river valley. The name is derived from the Old English words bel meaning a beacon and cnaepp meaning a hilltop. It displays many of the classic features of Cotswold-Severn long barrows and is often seen as a type-site for examples with lateral chambers.  The wedge-shaped mound is over 50m long and stands nearly 4m high; it is orientated north-south. At the north end is a deep forecourt between two rounded horns, and in the back of the forecourt is an H-shaped setting of stones, perhaps the remains of a portal dolmen. The ditch that seems to define the sides of the mound is a product of reconstruction work during the 1930s; the bank of soil and stones outside the ditch is in fact material that has weathered off the top of the mound.

Timothy Darvill. Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (2004:262) 

On Belas Knap I sat down

For I felt in need of some sacred ground

And I had no strength in my ragged soul

And for me the nonetide bell had ceased to toll

And so to Belas Knap by the withered tree

I hunted him who haunted me.

For I’d lost my way in Bethlehem

And I’d bartered my name to Rome

And the body of god was a dry wafer crisp

And my soul felt as cold as stone

And the book in my hand had lost is voice

And the altar candles their flame

And the blood had turned to cheap red wine

And the world had lost your name.

Then I heard it in the earth

And I felt it in the air

And the crowing of the birds above

An older voice laid bare.

The spilling of a wilder blood

The beat of shaman drum

The smell of earth and woody moss

The cycles of the sun.

And its…

1 for the man who counts our bones

2 for the woman who carries our souls

3 for the man who reads the stones

4 for the woman who flies with the crows

5 for the man who rides the moon

6 for the man who catches the dream  

And the primal drum beat pulses

Through the veins of every leaf

As before the Christ and devil danced

To the frozen music of our creeds

The Alpha and Omega busts out of Palestine

No longer held by cultures

No longer bound by time.

And so to Belas Knap I came

And kindled there a dying flame

And as I sat on ancient ground

It was an older God I found

As in the shade of a withered tree

I hunted him who haunted me.

On WASHING Days...

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... particularly on April washing days like this; when I stand at the sink, hands as red and furrowed as the antique faces of babies, and I can look up to a sky so heavenly blue that if I were to reach up and drag it down and were to bury my face in it I would smell the wax crayons of God; and amidst that sailor boy blue the proud castles of cumuli, boil and bluster, cauliflowering the almost spring heavens. It is on days like these that I hear loudest the call of the my childhood imagination - so real I could have dreamt it only yesterday.

Perhaps it is the sight of washing billowing before the galleon-ing wind and the walks I had with Mum, down the Green Lane that squeezed its way between the long narrow strips of back-garden terraces and allotments. A silent no-man's land; a furtive quiet place from which other worlds could be spied through gaps in fences. It smelt of compost heaps and midday lunch being cooked and the smouldering bonfires of weeds. It was filled with the sound of dogs barking and their wet-nosed snuffling and most of all, the wild tear-filled wind played among the washing, pegged and propped, like a clipper's sails.

Mum was never happier than when she had pegged out her beaten but clean army of washing on the line after a morning steaming in the kitchen, until the condensation ran down the windows and walls like rain and the air was sliced by the sharp smell of boiling handkerchiefs and washing powder. And I was never happier than when, tilting like Don Quixote at the ballooning sheets and bedspreads, I raced through them feeling their coldness trickle down my face and Mum calling me in so as not to get her washing dirty and we had jam on our bread while the radio played.

But for some reason, what calls to me the most is a couple of pictures from a book I have long since lost. They are of towering clouds in a powder blue sky (a washing day sky) and in those clouds was a whole town, with shops and lampposts and a sun that shone yellow. It seemed to me that all the men in it were avuncular uncles with bald heads and wide smiles and they wore old fashioned Sunday suits. The type of uncle who made sixpences appear from inside your ear, even when you knew that there were no sixpences there, because you had checked. And the women all looked like the Queen, when she was young, and wore long dresses that swept along the red-bricked pavements. There was a friendly red dragon in the picture too. I assume he was friendly; he had big smiling eyes and a head shaped like a Labrador.

I say assume, for, as I recall, the book had no covers. It was just a few stray pages and so it had no story. It was like me, without beginning or end. Just as I, one day, found myself alive in a world of sun and colour, noise and scent, this world within these few pictures, just was. And it was those pictures that captivated me and it was in them that I found my stories beyond words.

From 3 to 30 I read very few words, I immersed myself in the pictures. I inhabited them, I explored behind every wall, every hedge, and over every beckoning, windmilled, church-spired, horizon. I played with Janet and John, and Dick and Jane outside their world of words. Lanes were adventured and streams raided for sticklebacks and pirated treasure. I read pictures with the skill of a textual critic and hours could be lost over just one page. Sometime ago, I bought a secondhand copy of one of my most favourite childhood books, a Ladybird book about a mountain adventure. I opened the cover and began to read the unfamiliar story that lay beside the oh so familiar pictures. A little while later I found myself, once more lost in those pictures. The story remains unread, but the pictures await for more adventures.

Easter SUNDAY Morning...

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... quite early, and the street was as still as the ghost of sheep on the high hill. But dawn had broken. Oh lord, how it had broken, sending splinters of light into the victorious, ringing, bird-carved, air. Even though snow still lay as white as sea foam on Sunrising Hill and lay under each hedge, ribbed, like the bare, bleached bones of ship-wrecked schooners, the sun had risen high; higher than the turbulent rooks and higher than the breath that billowed in clouds of steam from my ragged body.

I walked abroad in the slumbering village, and as alone as a blushing, rib-full, Adam, beneath a sky of thrush egg blue; as blue as the cornflowers of summers past. Down Main Street, past Quo Vadis. No curtains twitched, though the garden hedges bristled with song. The occupant of each house slept warm and deep under the soft hills and folds of their duveted wildernesses. Jackdaws wheeled and laughed among the sleeping bones of the old oak on Fourways Corner to see the sun beams of that beautiful morning trying to prise their honeyed fingers through the neat, new shutters of the Old Shop and its cymbal playing tin monkey. A blackbird stood as proud as your mother (should she see you now) in the middle of the road. The sun warm on her back. She watched me pass with beetle eyes, a harmless spirit in her eternal eden of sun and ice.

Only two other souls were awake. The vicar who, with knitted brow, played with whirling fingers the organ of the braying heating pipes in the village church. Climbing down from one of the Jacobean, dark oak pews, he fussed some dust into the morning air as the sun poured like Eucharist wine through the great east window and stained the altar cloth crimson and blue and, oh, such golds. Does he know that, when no one is looking, the faded saints and the firemen in their smart blue serge climb down out of their stained glass windows to ring out the hour on the faithful old tenor? Or that, in the church tower (made of rough brick and cobwebs and prayer), the stone angels play hide and seek with the umbrella-winged bats, piping and squeaking, in the belfried dark? Or that, behind his back, at every Pentecost, the yews in the churchyard burst into flame and that tongues of fire dance upon every shaggy branch?

The other is the runner who outruns the dawn, red faced and breathing out dragon's breath, down past the village hall (built in 1929), newly painted, and then past the Post Office, bursting with wool and flowers and unlicked stamps, and on past the shuttered tearoom. But not even he can outrun my nose in this impudent north-easterly wind that has been sharpened by the claws of polar bears, and the clash of icebergs, and carries down these whistling streets the sound of Saami bells, and shamanic gongs and the deep green waters where the blue whales sing. Past the Peacock, smelling of booze and laughter and last night's ashes. Down Saddledon Street to blow on my fingers and the sweet smell of the cattle barn on the frigid air. The old dog at Herbert's Farm snuffled where foxes loped, loose-limbed and laughing, under the frosted thatch and snow and dreamt of the days he ran wild and free over Orchard Hill. A woodpecker drummed out his exuberant life among the sighing trees. The morning whistled and trilled.

As I returned home, my hand on the garden gate, the Park Keeper opened his front door and roared out his approval to the triumph of the morning.

Those EYES of OLD look at ME...

... and, through the haze of your futures, I look back at you.

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I can remember those shoes; the feel of elastic over the bridge of my foot, my fingers curling over the smooth, slightly ribbed texture of the soles... and the smell of rubber and dust... and the coolness of the painted tiles. 

        I remember when buttons felt as big and as creamy as deep-glowing moons of coloured fire, slipping hard and soapy between my fingers and how they defied the narrow, buttonhole slits in all my clothes.

But then again - perhaps - I don't remember... 

          not really...

                          ... only the awareness of vague formless sensations of experiences collected through the dream-time avenues of memories and the songways of my past. 

       What sounds could you hear in that place of sun and laughter? Were there bees humming? Was there the clink of a Sunday morning mechanic busy about his car? Could you hear birds? Ice cream vans? Lawnmowers?

I struggle to remember in the same way that I struggle to recognise in you my heart, my veins, the water of my eyes, the beat of my soul... 

               ...and I also fear that neither would you be able to recognise in me the 'I's that we both know and are.

_________________________

So I sit here - looking across the calendars of my years - and all I want to do is to reach out and protect you: 

       To put my arms around you and to hold you in that sunny, laughing day. I want to shield you from all those days that are my memories and that you have yet to live; from those careless, thoughtless words of youth that you will hear and that will bury themselves deep within you so that you will never forget; those voices that will stay with you and bend the paths you take; the glances given (perhaps not even really meant) that will take away that laughter...

... oh, it will return. That laughter WILL return many many times, but never in quite the same way as it was then. 

You will discover things that will make your world grow dark and you will learn to fear and when you look into the night skies you'll cry. For it was in Eden, before there was ever any fiery sword of exile, that we first learnt about fear. Little man, you will hurt people (though you never wished it) and that hurt will remain with you and you will make so many, many mistakes...

       

                   ... and, you see, I want to save you from all that...

_________________________                     

.....But is this the father in me speaking? Wanting to protect, wanting to keep safe a young flame who doesn't yet realise how tender it is.

And yet I see you there - sitting on that sunny porch - and I realise that I am not your father. I am in no position to be your guardian. It is YOU who is MY father. I am grown from you, not you from me. I am YOUR progeny. What I am, in part, is because of what you were/are and all those thousand upon thousand other 'me's caught millisecond by millisecond in the flickerboard of my life; each one taking over where the other leaves off.

Now I understand what you are saying to me. You have others to care for you (and they cared for you well) and those others will dry your tears (when those times come). I see again the spontaneous, unselfconscious laughter of one poised on the edge of a glorious world. I see once more the little child who laughing opens his arms to the world and say's, "I'm here, what wonders will you bring to me?"  

That little laughing lad will one day, through film and pixel, sit across from me and say, "this is what you have come from. This is how your journey started - with laughter and open arms embracing the world. Finish it too with laughter and open arms."

I am glad you were there - little man...
        Your heart still beats within me.

THEOLOGIA

I have never sought a transcendent God,

nor one that sat on sovereign heights above angel wings

on sceptred thrones or in hallowed vaults

that echoed with eternal hymns.

For I have sought

only one,

who

would come and sit with me
and drink tea from a china cup

one velvet, late-summer's afternoon

when shadows stretch across evening lawns.

And who, smiling, would balance

a bumblebee on the tip of his finger

and clap his hands at a stranger's joke.

Music written and performed by Helen  Ingram

AFTER the FIREWORKS

After the fireworks the rains came.
Long silvered spears that pierced the darkness, silently slicing the once electric, tumultuous air.
Slantwise and lazy, it fell upon the ground and the cardboard cones that exploded in fountains of colour and light with a hundred gasps of spellbound breath.
The leaves, slippery and wet, drifted upon the same wind that carried fire into the heavens.
The wire of sparklers, as thin as dowsing rods and just as magical, pin sharp and needle hot, lay unseen upon mud and grass (where beetles forage). And the rains came for them too.

The bonfire, built by men with serious faces and the light hearts of their youth, flamed with the roaring passion of a warrior in the wintering dark. Earlier a ring of silhouettes had gathered round it to stare into its strange dance. Its tattoo beating upon the more primal hearts. Fire attracts all, but its power seems to be the lightest upon the children. Excited they run and shout to each other above the roar. It is the elderly who feel its power the greatest. The ruddy flicker deepening the lines of aged faces -contours of grief and laughter and unspent anxieties. They stand, silently staring into the deep furnace; lost to the cold and the ticking of eternity, their eyes once more ageless as they yield to a magic that once stirred their souls.

Stand here and watch those who are entering maturity, see how they will suddenly break away from the jostling throng, as if something has suddenly caught their eye; their eyes drawn to the alchemy of flame dancing under the bowl of night. For a short while they are stilled, silent, feeling the beat of the heat upon their faces. Watch their eyes, the way they stand, poised on adulthood. They see how this light discloses the deeper, truer, wilder beauty of the little group of girls alongside. They are learning to listen to this strange song of fire that is sirening their souls. For a while they stand mute and enchanted, then the noise of childhood pulls them back. But next year, they'll be here. Standing perhaps a little longer... looking a little deeper... losing themselves a little further in the great hymn of smoke and spark and flame. For evermore, each fire they encounter, in hearth or garden, they'll seek out that ancient song that called to them in their youth: The older they get, the stronger it will be.

But the rains came even for this; hissing and soughing, as the wood and hedgerows once more come alive. And now, the embers glow and wink like dragons' eyes and the ash lies thick and black upon the grass. It will remain there for many months to come - this circle of night where once the darkness blazed with light and we stood together to catch, once more, the songs of fire. And then the rain came. The glorious festival of water and light... and with it... the breathing silence of the land, once more, embracing the night.

MAGICKRY - A Gypsy Heart

As Autumn strides laughing across the fields, scattering raindrops and berries, I thought it might be a good time for some unabashed romanticism. 
Life teaches us two things:
1. Romance does the heart good and brings a smile to the soul - and,  on these darker and chillier evenings, who would deny us that? 
2. Small boys will always be totally captivated by a smile and a wild, gypsy heart ;)

Magickry - A Gypsy Heart

There was a pretty gypsy maid

In auburn glades she’d wend her ways

And soft among the elder’s shade

In summer’s haze, and silvered days

The oak and ash would sing to her

And bring to her their autumn blaze

And butterflies would follow her

And over her, in thistle-down

Would thread a web so spider thin

Of rainbow hues to dress her in

And dew-gems for a crown.

She sang her songs of mystery

And wizardry and magickry

And spells that bind and mimicry

And filigree the stars that spun

Around her head with silken threads

Of orbits dark and distant suns

In ancient lore and alchemy,

And rune-wise, the words that she

Would weave among the grass   

 

She found a world of gallantry

Of errantry and pageantry

And though she longed to tarry there

And lose her heart and marry there

Her gypsy heart would carry there

The far off winds that harried her

Of distant lands that promised her

With silken words admonished her

Of oases green and fountains tall

Of stormy seas at the cliffs of fall

And zephyrs breathed vermilion

And gilded gold pavilions

And stallions and sherbet from

The opium fields of Avalon

In darker days, the wind would say

“There are other paths that call your way”

At night these paths would sing to her

And bring to her, and wing to her

The friends of her, of wings and fur

With wilder hearts astir.

By badger light and lantern’s sigh

And lonely flies the vixen’s cry

And all would come to sit with her

With heart and soul close-knit with her

Find comfort ‘neath the ash and briar

They sought beside her dreaming fire.

When alone among the moon beam’s dance

Schoolboy did chance to steal a glance

And held by her smile of golden bliss

He sought her kiss upon his cheek

And by this feat, he’d be a king.

As sparks flew up from firelight’s glow

And fireflies show the crystal’s globe

She held his hand so merrily

That happily and gallantly

He walked this world as new.

And now beneath the forest’s moon

And soft among the moths that flew

And swans that glide down woody steams

In dreams, he sings her tune.