Cocoon. Then move through.
Choose your green-veined awning.
Bind to stiff xylem your dun hideout.
Hunker down, drapes drawn.
Unplug. Slice though wires.
Digest the old, dream the new.
Imaginal cells spin in fertile dark.
To birth your imago,
Nourished in compost of what’s past.
Shake the ash from your wings.
Polly Oliver ~2019
Picture Credit: Christy Rice from Pexels
The size of a grain of rice, a lentil,
Tail-anchored to algae petals,
so minute, unfeasibly cute.
Snouting from soft camouflage,
Tucked in curls of wafting current,
A tiny, briny dream.
I knew your heart would smile
When you saw it; unlikely, fragile,
But clinging on. Like love.
Polly Oliver ~2019
Butterfly beating
A frantic path through raindrops.
Climate out of joint.
This is not for you:
Crawling through broken glass,
For those crystal needles of joy.
To bathe in their rainbow sparks,
And wash in the opium musk of her,
Sinking into that velvet dark,
Wrapped in her folds and curves.
Heave your heart away:
Let gusts of grief steer your course
Homeward, on rivers of tears
From those desert shores,
Where bones of other souls
Lost to her sad Siren calls
Litter forbidden ruins of love.
Gorse on the wind
That tends these old stones.
Cars trickle soundless below,
Mites on the September brown
Skin of bog and moor,
That’s eyed in blue
With a myth-deep pool
Which, unblinking, watches
Centuries counted above
In the husks and discs
Of an aging moon.
Shallow-rooted as bracken-
It’s fire-tinted frond tips
Crackling like autumn flames-
I pause
Between sandstone and sky.
Untreasured.
Small creases
Coursing clear cheeks
Where lines now sit.
Forgotten as that moment-
An occasion undateable.
Shiny glaze dulled in spots.
Through smudged decades,
That face; gaze straight,
Not beautiful nor otherwise,
Expression un-fazed.
No sense of placement ahead
In social feed, or on the web
For scrolling past,
Thumb-dibbing a ‘like’,
Or trite little đź’“.
No comments awaited.
Familiar yet apart,
Reflection on a slant,
Glancing off time’s waters.
The shadows are lengthening.
And with this, comes a dampeningÂ
In the breeze that’s now sliding
Down the dusk-flanked hill.
Over our kisses, trees whisper
The wood’s warning that crepuscular
Trysting calls forth danger
Unmentionable still.
I see goosepimples springing
On your freckled arms, wrapping
My passion, that’s cooling
With the darkening chill.
Gold-green which shone on our embraces
No longer dapples our now watchful faces
From the old path’s bends it races
And in the gloaming grows a thrill-
Of dread at what could now be coming
With the darkness that is thickening
Between us and what’s listening,
In the tumbledown mill.
Your head flicks right, to footsteps unseen.
Oh my love! We start to a hidden scream.
Or laughter? We’re frozen, as those in a bad dream
Only dreams cannot kill…
