By Silvia, 17th of March 2021
The world spins slow on its axis
I welcome the sun’s acid kiss
The higher the peak, the deeper the abyss
Skittish lamb, unsteady in a premature spring
To love you is to live without skin,
Uncoupled from time
You arrived and I’ve no gifts to bring
Will you teach me gentleness
How to lean into the world’s invisible hand
Secure that in the night of your cloud eyes
I am seeing my present for the last time.
Blue light
By Sil
Hereford hospital 11th of March, 2021
Under the blue light
You fold and unfold
Flesh origami
Five pounds of flailing limbs
Articulated toes
What is incomplete remains unarticulated
Life juts upward
Like it has a plan
A diaphragmatic drum
Triumphantly pounding
against miniature ribs
Through translucent plastic
I am looking
At a blueprint of the future
fully arrived, yet half-known
Your face is turned away
And your eyes swim in darkness
So I read you hunger backwards
In your breath
Fanning fingers
That curl around our ancestral past
I read your stirring
The arching of your back
Your your moon-shaped body has a deep gravity
And mine is but a giant satellite tuned to a single frequency
(By Sil, 25th of December 2020
Christmas morning
The rooks sing
Dogs circle the pond
Frosted water-mint
Under a pink sky
I left you breathing
This simplest of facts
Is no longer a cliché
Christmas is a tally of a year passed
Time’s own special attaché
The last twelve months -
Marbles
That rolled under the kitchen sink
This Christmas morning
The choirs will not sing
And we will not bless each-other
With peace
Beyond disrupted human custom
Life is perpetually at ease
The quiet valley
That grows into light
(by Gub, 27th of December 2020)
For me
You don’t exist
You are like a folded shadow;
A part-time preacher
promising a sermon
That never comes
I listen for words to lighten
the dark
For some noise to deaden the echo
Of my own voice - but no chords are
Struck.
I am feint with hunger for sound
Unhinged by my own interminable guide track.
When will you speak.
What noise will you make, amidst the clatter of my tortured thinking.
For if you voice a thought
What will I answer back....?
(By Gub, 25th of December 2020)
Crystal light
A Moon beam
On ice
Flakes sifting
Down
Onto a frozen
Pine floor
The song of the
Troika bells silenced
The dancers enfolded:
Holding
Life still
Breath held
Forever
A cold enchantment
Or love’s promise ?
And Timeless
Against the glistening
Canvas
Of white white snow
(By Gub 23rd of November 2020)
Could a breath exhaled
Reach that far?
From a faltering heart
To a newborn star...
This fluvial magma
Of blood stills
To the tideway point
On a crimson sandbar
Beyond the mantle
Of a darkening world
Eclipsed by silent lights
Souls search out
Empty atoms
To stowaway;
Being begins it’s journey
So quiet
An unsounded
Prayer bell
Winds unfurl
Around the flag
Whip
Crisp air
Into the blue reach
Of a frozen
Mountain
Peak
Seek out new planets
New horizons
On which to settle
Breathe life
Into passing cells
A delicate unfolding
Pulse
Echoes
Across time and space
An answering heartbeat ...
