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ON NOT GOING TO STONEHENGE
Setting off proves impossible.
The battering winds
hurl down across the hill
shovelling up land in pitches
between squalls.
We move through landslides
of lakes glistening where fields were,
wild white homecomings
that never arrive.
I am ragged, uprooted,
a scarecrow figure warning others
not to attempt liberation,
lest the wires engulf them,
too much attempted
and nothing done
we can take rest only in the not doing
Strangers and friends dance in turn
turning into clouds, rain floods
of fear and Winter coldness, the dread
of falling as in a dream,
time cascading down in torrents,
unfinished aspirations,
brittle and shattered separations,
our early hopes, naive, like a brief dawn,
glimmerings of light above the cloud horizon
before the fog rolls in along the valley sea-wet
like a dark perfume cloud of death.
Here is the land of the death mother,
her stone temple ominous with truth
locked up inside her, tongue-tied trilithions
speaking a language we have lost,
a hard love, stone worn, cracked granites and blues,
dark chambers, prophetic peace flying above,
waiting to come in with the first rays,
the returning rays of the lord of light, from far off,
Come to us now, this hardly living land,
our hope scattered and reduced to plotting
against each other's plots and they against us
Come to us and renew our original insight,
make us youthful and bright with love
again, the kind of love that hopes always,
Scota, death mother, here is your dark killing ground,
tanks wheel around you, spitting shells,
missives of power, speaking in real world tongues
with iron fire, Wayland's nearly wisdom,
and the sharpened Saxon knives,
frightening the deer people away
into the ever falling sunset...
Scota, once we erect tabernacles
pilgrim stones, wisdom pools,
temples of rock or wood,
we bring something merely to surmount you,
to coax back you light again,
even though we must shed for it.
Do not attempt the project of Being
unless you can attain patience,
storage, perseverance, the stone wheel of virtue,
the stacked labour, hoisted and proved,
the dance in the testing ground...
Otherways we can be foxes,
chasing our tails, running in circles
around the wheel,
looking for a light big enough to coax you out,
Yet for that we must stop and embrace the Word itself,
and the source of the word, become one
with the still silent seed point of soundlessness
where the known and the forgotten,
the remembered and the not known,
the sound and the not sound,
merge in an impossible harmony,
like a dream of storms surmounted,
of love attained after the long labour
of the forever true...
Thomas Daffern (January 1999)
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BRANSCOMBE BAY
Blinking, with wings outstretched,
I lap up the sun dappled,
Slithery silver clouds.
Heart pumps like the earth's breath,
Slowly with solidity, yet
its rhythm fades gradually into
the infinity of the sea's shore
One day, with the ocean,
all movement will cease
for our planet's ever.
This moment stands as it is,
My eye soaking up the heavenly radiance,
My throat ready to swallow.
The day of the Great Cormorants.
Waiting. Waching. Learning. Knowing.
The clouds forming Aztec gods:
Chacmul, the god of thunder, scowling,
Quetzalcoatl, the life giver, controlling.
I died that day,
Seven thousand times.
My soul split asunder,
fragmented, every instant,
shattered across our universe.
Our emergent fruit initiated
by the sun's rays within us.
Dilwyn Jenkins
[PUBLISHED GREENLEAF MARCH 1999]
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