its day

Realm of time and reason

Sky-blues

I, who am weightless

Illusory

Eternitus

The serpent coils about the world,
swallows itself from tail to tongue:
an enigma that feeds itself
upon itself; a fire that burns
but is never consumed.

Pure Invention

Where we live
is pure invention,
the cage in which we pace,
where we dwell, creatures of habit.

Midpoint of Nothing

Stars without conjunction
cross Heaven’s half-world;
only empty space beyond
our orbits and ellipses.

Assumption

fate
is a product of the sky
on some distant black night
in which we squint at the stars
and follow them sunwise
to planetfall

Orbituary

Icarus
was an invention

Last Snows of Spring

In the sky, the wind is like an arrow,
Clouds cross it like fog shredding
And the blue, cracked and hard, cold,
Like the surface of ice when sun shines.

Deid Watter

Gillie Mhor, a seadog, twa wiks deid,
Wisna mindin i skrach o gulls an the heave o the deep
Nor profit an loss.
The doundraig neth I faem
Chawed his banes clean. An he rose an fell
Past aa his ages an his growin
As he sweelt roon Corryvreckan.
Billy or Tim,
Ye aa caa the wheel an see fit wye the win blaws,
Think on the Gillie Mhor, aince braw an as streetched as thee.

Menu Ad Astra

Eric Idle, Professor Brian Cox and Noel Fielding are explaining the universe in a forthcoming BBC musical - The Entire Universe - showing over Christmas, on Boxing Day, I believe. I thought it relevant to resurrect this piece. 

---

To start:

Hydrogen bombes,

     Delicate, nascent cosmic embryos

     Of pure fusion universes,

     Less than a nanosecond old,

     As big as grapefruit and as dense

     As all there is.

Carbon Cycle

1

Long before
Our meticulous schemes
Went up in smoke,
We were residue:
The stars’ dry dust.

Burned already.

At our feet, charred remains
Rub marks across another kind of page,
Reticulated, blackened wood,
Fired and fissured, friable to the touch,
The hatching of an image,
Or, perhaps, a memory.

The ashes were cold
By the time we woke;

Then, a hundred million suns
Until we scratched even a line on a stone
Or discovered combustion for ourselves.

Reactive

Our corrosive dreams,
Drops on the surface,
Burned our ambition
Into the earth.

Beneath our feet:
Chains of events.
Oscillations,
Change.

Our footprints remain.
The sea claims and solidifies them
Until they are fossilized
And we are the dead.

Quanta

Heavy weather, this moment,
Shapes what follows.

The wavecrest runs to shore
Its rise and fall inevitable
Just as its rise and fall
Responds to the seabed slope
It rattles over.

Cloud piles in before
The weather front
And every squall throws itself
In downpours on the upslope hills.

How Many Eyes?

How many eyes

Have looked up

And seen the stars remain the same:

The same as ever?

How many eyes bear witness
To the season’s edge
To the cusp of day and night,
To the storm-front clearing after rain
To the blinding sun
And the dazzling moon?

Nihilistic

There is nothing left you can rage against.

Rail against the night, the day,

Whatever blue the sky is

Above your heart that thunders:

A cloud gone beyond grey
To colour, filtered pigmentation,
Like blood beneath skin.

We choose not to see
How far light has come
To meet us here.

This is the fading moment,
When all the things that drift from heaven
Come to us as dust
Specks on the remaining wind
Grace, salvation, the blessings
Of some imagined God
Eroded by distance or time,
All but invisible in our eyes.

There is nothing left to bruise your anger on.

In the backlit halo
Of your disappointment,
In memory or misunderstanding,
The descending starshine
Shaved an atom’s width
Of paradise to lay it
Unrecognisable at your feet.

This is what years become,
What hope amounts to:
Falsehood projected on naked tomorrow,
Heaven, not as we divine it,
But heartless and indifferent.

There is nothing left when everything is put away,
When we remember the places built to conceal
The things we could not bear.

By our hands we understand,
With them, we sign and shape,
Frame distance in the grid of our fingers
And the labouring of our hearts.

Here and now, and not hereafter,
Time and space are structured.
Should we dare to act in them,
We reinvent tomorrow,
Reconstruct from so much dust
Paradise from its scattered pieces.

There is nothing else.

© BH 2013

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I heard Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, on Desert Island Disks today. There was a brief comment on writing poems starting with a title. She does this apparently but it may not be entirely poetically normal.

This one of mine came that way. I have an alphabet of them in my Initialising cycle, started in 1996, where each line is a word in an acrostic sequence. I'm half way through having begun in 1996. Time I got it finished, eh?

Check the cycle here: http://writer.filmdesign.org.uk/bh/initialising.html This poem is here.

Orthogenesis

The stars do not fall.

All the eyes in heaven spiral free

And come at last to earth. 

Continents, divided by the sea,

Slip, one by one, over the round horizon.

Earthbound

What I write

In the pages of this place

As if on the walls of a prison

Is simply a poem

Or an epitaph.