Today
I saw a white feather and birdsong filled the woods.
After I cried we hugged and purple flowers bloomed
from the blood behind my eyelids, closed against loss.
I was The Fool with her sack of valueless goods,
Coloured stones and poems wrapped in bright cloth,
Hiking along a path of optimism
Eyes to the clouds, your heart under my boots.
And now it has cracked and I’m falling through.
Poets and writers we may seek to be-
But do we then lack authenticity
When each pearl’d drop of life is pooled away
And re-cast in cold ink on another day?
‘True’ living and recording will never quite chime,
Experience twists for the bard for her rhyme.
Strawberry Moon rises
To the honeysuckle breath
Of a sultry dusk.
Rose and Jasmine twine sweetly,
Soft evening laughter ripples.
~Polly Oliver (2018)
Defined by its fatal desire for more-
Antennae ragged, blackened with the bright
And white-hot kernel at the candle’s core,
This soft-winged, heat-drunk warrior of light,
Charmed and enflamed by phototaxic lust
Re-gathers all its primitive life force
To smash its quivering body to grey dust
In its addiction-led, predestined course.
And just like them, though my own wing tips burn,
With junkie-esque predictability-
To your relentless, boiling sun I turn,
Flying towards destruction willingly.
Ash in my hair, my mouth, my bleeding eyes,
Dying to live within your fire the prize.
Polly Oliver -2018
Photo by Egor Kamelev from Pexels
Bit of a ten minute-er , based on current mood.
Polly x
There’s nothing like old friends, or kids
to kick you hard, under the ribs –
evidencing, as they do
how much things change, and how much you
and smiling past selves have been lost
as ghosts; evaporated like tears.
Pretending to be happy turns you grey.
The mask will have to crack one day.
The desperate mirth of Comedy’s smile
tilting to Tragedy’s broken wail.
Each cardinal point
Tells of Wasteland.
Primordial sand –
shifting under a frozen wind,
hissing with voices of spirits
shipwrecked on this skeleton coast,
rimmed by a glittering line of sea.
Here castaway fragments and relics
are spat after decades adrift
from the blue-throated Ocean
and maw of Estuary.
Husks of things rustle
with the dry scuttle of grains
at the foot of crumbling dunes –
Earth’s ebbing with each tide to feed
the ever-hungry sea.
Living footfalls trace this place of endings
with crunch of empty shell and crisp-brittle
crack of lost urchins:
Calcium Carbonate – chalk to dust
in a driftwood boneyard
where desolate roots reach, beseech
the pitiless sky, like the arms of a crazy woman;
a dinosaur rib-cage in each whitened heap.
But with each turn of a gypsy moon’s
round face, all is washed and re-framed.
Shell innards polished to spirals of pinkish pearl,
Pastel-shaded plastic tears pepper the edge of the world.
You see the broken beauties, pull them free
Fill your pockets and gaze on the skittish sea
That calls your salted blood.
Though you try to stay anchored
to land-stranded love
You’re already away;
barnacle-bottomed, horizon-bound.
New shores to be found;
The fall and rise of the Shearwater’s realm,
The call of the storm,
The lure of the helm.
You wash your soft feet
Heat-bathing in the fire-glow.
Paw-sing to watch flames.
(Polly Oliver~2018)
