Beyond Pain, 300 B.C. Poem

Black night thoughts,
A coarse rope,
Bind me in pain
From you.

In the black
‘Loch an Duin’,
A Big Dark Bud
Rises.
A Red Lily’s Petals and Glossy Orange Stamens
Open,
Around a Nectar Pool.

Dream paralysed,
Watching and fingering your Glossy hologram,
Till I can take no more and
Sink into the bog,
'Tollund' man,
Entering

Again
Your Nectar Heart,
As petals

Close.

http://www.tollundman.dk/default.asp

Lakshmi image from www.vishvaupa.com

The Water Lily is 'James Brydon'

After I’d written this poem I found this relevant information on ‘Girl Scientist’s 360 Yahoo blog:

It has to do with sex. Now most people know that bugs normally fly from flower to flower, getting pollen all over their body while gathering nectar to eat. Landing on a different flower, the flower hopes that some of the pollen will come off and stick to the stigma (female part of the flower). That way a pollen tube can form and fertilize the eggs.

The water lily has put a little twist on things. The first day it opens, it lacks pollen. Instead the structures that carry the pollen (stamens) are smooth and slippery and surround a clear pool of poisonous nectar. The bug, after visiting an older water lily with pollen, sees a pool of what it thinks to be nectar and lands in the centre.
It struggles but cannot fly out, because it is wet and the poison is affecting it. It cannot crawl out because of those incredibly smooth pollen less stamens. It dies.

The pollen from its body floats about in the pool of poison and when the flower closes for the night the pool drains, carrying the pollen to the stigma. The next day, when flower opens the stamens are covered in pollen ready for a new bug to carry it in a fatal journey to another day old lily.

For more fun with plant sex, ‘Girl Scientist’, from whom I got this information, highly recommends the video ‘Sexual encounters of the floral kind’.

Isle of Rum from Isle of Barra, Scotland

 

H

Test

Woken to the waning moon outside my window,

 Woken to the waning moon outside my window,

To my unspectacled eye,  

like a twinkling star, flashing a message

from a silvery sphere of naked branches.

Through veiling clouds moving

like the beam of a long forgotten Maine lighthouse

still searching

calling me

to that first cherry blossom….

AFTER IMAGE

 AFTER IMAGE

I watched the village of Auchtermuchtie filling with snow. It is a lovely village. So quiet. We walked to the church for the Christmas service and met only one person on the way. It was the most bizarre service. The ‘minister’ rung the bells and the congregation of about 15 appeared. The service was choreographed by a very funny and peculiar ex Salvation Army husband and wife team. Good stand up comedy. All were included in the jokes. My wife said I laughed loudest. “Ho, Ho, Ho!”

A beautiful church inside and out. My intense vision was the changing afterimage of a stained glass window becoming the heavily bleeding head of Christ.

I forgot that image, though it had filled my vision and was as gorgeous and hypnogogic as ever a vision could be. It was a Miracle, my rich and colourful miracle. Everyday life is full of other, usually unnoticed, everyday miracles. 

Another Day is dawning.

What is left of the Christmas wrappings?

https://youtu.be/8XG1B_7r4y8

Here is a detail from the forest at the base of the tombstone. 

I feel I want to enter this forest and walk though into the mountains.

“1045–1105 In the jade hall I sit across from a painting by Guo Xi 

that  makes me feel I have come to the verge of the greenwood. Guo Xi was an official painter but [his spirit] was distant and remote.

In colors he concealed his ink and in ink concealed the water.”

https://asia.si.edu/publications/

Aerial Acrobats

The evening sky burst
heavenly blue
and fantastically
a couple of Martins flew.

They soared, they dived,
and stalled,
acrobats on high
catching insects
in the sky.

Autumn Prayers

Above me,

beneath me,

falling to earth,

Autumn prayers.

Kokoro

Kokoro

You will gain little from these words set adrift from my emotional ebb and flow.

This afternoon a crack of lighting woke me from a dream. Out of the darkness a blinding flash lit stone slabs and mountain peaks. I'd found the stone tablets on a mountain. They were 21 century copies but I was impressed as the writing sizzled in the rain but it wasn't the tablets that were important. It was the illumination by lightning.

I had been reading, 'Kokora' by Soseki and its fatal pessimism clung to me. Empathising with the characters had the effect of recalling in exquisite detail the lives of tragic characters in my own life. It was as if a spotlight, out of my control, illuminating them, all unhappy and insane, one sadly dead.

A spotlight can light up many things. I once worked a carbon arc spotlight at The American Ice Show in Istanbul. I was so ill with dysentery that walking to the show and following the skaters round with my arc light was all my conscious life. The hissing arc light would sometimes even wander off randomly and illuminate someone in the audience until an American voice on the headphone woke me.

That arc light has given me hope, a vision beyond human kind. We can choose what we shine our light on, what we focus on and what we see. Our whole vision can be transformed. In Van Gogh's case an 'ordinary' young girl was significant.

Bothy in Scotland Part1

We arrived at the bothy and I looked in the window to a dark interior. On my mind was "The Hill Farmer Speaks" by R. S. Thomas. I saw my reflection with the mountains behind, 'reflections of the way life used to be', farm buildings in ruins and this last house, long deserted.

"I am the farmer, stripped of love
And thought and grace by the land's hardness;
But what I am saying over the fields'
Desolate acres, rough with dew,
Is Listen, listen, I am a man like you....."

http://youtu.be/H8v-uc-DI7g