08/10/2020

Gazing at Swifts

Black dots of activity swirl in whirlpool intensity

In blissful radial symmetry

Swifts frantically prepare for night

Form phrase from flight

 

Birds in natural chaos

Order themselves in a flurry of spirals

Darting in clusters for their home

The gasping jaws of the cave hold safety

They weave between stalactite in glee

Oscillate like water breathtakingly

 

It is an urgent surge

The days last dance

Fork tailed swifts charge the last throws of light

Scatter in reds and freewheel on air

Where the river leaves the mouth of the cave

they muster with hypnotic energy

I know in that moment

Part of me is forever free and made for synchronicity

 

24/09/2020

Unnamed


Water makes the world chant

A steady whisper heard by billions

of twitching bodies

Resonators constantly receiving

the unfinished news of the living

 

Liquid norms undulate above and below

Even within us

We clatter and churn like water contained

Dash after dash after dash

No longer at home

On our home

 

Listen to the humming secret in your body

Beyond the unseen and insular

A mysterious and intimate knowledge waits

A language we were born with

Wordlessly it cycles through our existence

Evaporating off the dry husk of hardship

Returning in fresh downpour time and time again

02/09/2020

Echoes and Edges

Echoes and Edges create sonic worlds inspired by poetry. I had the  opportunity to offer some of my words for them to improvise over. It was a pleasure to hear how the words animated and took on fresh expresssion as a result of their work.

You can listen to their latest response to one of my poems 'On these things and more' -  here





01/09/2020

Chatter Speech Screams

Anthropocene we know you will not pause 
Gears grind gung-ho, macho ideas win 
for now, drowning rains we debate the cause 
We callous conquerors turn from dark skin 

Elemental fury has me shaking 
Land ice is sweating to kill in cold blood 
The seas surge god like, human hearts aching 
Flood after flood after flood after flood 

The angry planet holds some special good 
You can hear it at the mouth of a brook 
Each tree has a tongue speaking for the wood 
The loose jaw of nature an endless book 

We have to realign, do something and weep 
Change is here, we are all called to leap

13/08/2020

The underwater sound of Heavy Hearts

Last night I was visited by Killer Whales

The thing is I never usually dream of other animals

We were on a kind of theme park glacier

The Whales grew increasingly impatient of the hoards

People who interpreted their presence as a sign

evidence that the human project was blessed

The scientist she told me that the Wales want to be acknowledged

That they wait vigorously to pierce our hubris

so they can broadcast their soundscapes of truth

Visceral messages which would melt our hearts to water our brains

And dissolve our muddled certainty

These creatures are restless to repurpose confusion  

They do not play with our fear they seek to channel it

We have gathered tears from their tear ducts for decades

Yet still ignore their grief

 

A groaning churning world preoccupies us

We dally with positive spins

Thin, cosmetic delusions

The longing for a panacea twists us up

corkscrewing our heads deeper into the sand

Swerving past the gritty grains of truth

As we dash around for cinematic moments of hope

And cast ourselves as saviour to the play things.

 

Play things they are not

They want to be met

They have been tapping out a message

Let’s start there

Swimming through the broken ice of reality

Their heavy hearts are more than facts

Their swirling every day is not friendly

The life all around us is kinetic in its disbelief

Insisting on relatedness

Calling to our wild selves to awaken

And commune with the textured anguish of the deep sea

Their urgency will soon be ours

Discomfort crashing in with intuitive waves of knowledge

Intrusive is the truth

That time is up

 

Killer Whales burst in to my consciousness

Wanting to be acknowledged

Some humans have been diligently listening

I woke up from a dream to write this