Voices

People.
Like people I once knew,
Fathers and mothers,
Spoke to me again.

Voices,
Which time had worn away,
Echoed like memory
In the space between us.

As if the leaves,
Worn September leaves,
Still held on to life,
Death-defying in their high trees.

Long-lost souls returned
To their long-drawn place,
Turned imagined footsteps
Home.

Birds of park and wood,
Hoolet, cushat and peewit
Circled out of sight
From a dim-remembered place.

Mist on the far hill
Came like smoke
And went like the clouds
Leaving at sunset.

The wind rose and fell
Twisting leaves into rain
Beech, rowan, aspen, flakes of winter,
Long-gone, but coming soon.

Those voices, so old,
So full of heart,
Spoke as if nothing at all
Had withered in the glen.

Those voices, so bright,
Were yesterday for us
Dust in our fingers
Falling like the crumbling earth,
The crumbling earth that years become.

© BH 2012

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Another 'response' poem, this time to Gill Russell's Where Long Shadows Fall installation at Glenbuchat. It's actually nearly six months later, but a response is a response.  It was actually a snatch of video I took on my visit that caught my attention. The mist was like smoke in the air, especially in close-up. The voices in the audio were like those I grew up hearing. That was a while ago now.

Hearth / Sòrn

Night in the deep forest
Falls on blind eyes.
No-one sees the fading of the light.

Words,
Heard above birds in flight,
Speak in tongues not our own.
Other meanings hide
In their telling.

Fire in the earth
Came blue at last,
As if ice were lying
Just beneath the surface.

In the trees’ circle.
A ragged hem of sky,
Two shades paler
Than the black canopy,
Cupped one star
In parting cloud.

What had been snow,
Remnants of sleet and rain,
There, the mist falling
Was dew upon the eyes,
An infinity of moisture
From the pinewood’s arms.

In its ring of stones, blue,
With a cold element of stillness,
The patient light shone
As if there was no end to it.

Above, where no-one looked,
Now, the vague forest
Crackled with sounds moving:
The horse from right to left,
The beat of wings
Like eagle
Like moorhen
Like heather cock
With, behind, sounds calling
From forgotten seasons.

Then the singing,
High and cold
As if blue also was its colour.
A song like the sea,
A stream of southbound sea,
With waves and spume
Coming angular across the Minch
Where the blue men, Am Fear Gorm,
Steal the souls of sailors
From ever finding land.

In this forest,
A hundred miles given
To ground,
The haunted voice
Sang of landscapes lost,
Sons and husbands
Pulled down in the deep;
The deep of sea;
The deep of earth.

Cold slid uninvited
Beneath the skin.
Silence came at last
To the woodgrove
Where only dimness
Rose from the hearth-pit,
Light and shadow
On the long-trunked trees.

In this place,
The veil thinned
Between here and nowhere.
Trees, like masts,
Shone with St Elmo’s fire
While the ship of night
Heeled before a thousand winds.

© BH 2012

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I've written a few pieces for Gill Russell's work over the years. This is for her installation, Sòrn, part of the Where Long Shadows Fall project for Cairngorms National park. Sòrn is a light and audio installation in Strathmashie Forest and I couldn't resist making something to fit the place and the work. It's just an impression. What I remember of the night of the Lantern Walk on 22nd December last. Elemental nature with the crowds dispersed. And, yes, there was a star.

Scots Wha Hae Been Robbed

Men of Jockland, whaur ye be
rise oot o’ sleepless beds
An’ tak’ the airms o’ haunless men
an’ pull them frae their steeds.
For these gaunt chiels wi’ chisels sharp
tae cut for their intent
Wad carve an’ shape yer warldly hoors
an’ gar ye pay them rent.

Aldebaran Races

The Aldebaran ladies sing this song dah doo dah doo
The Aldebaran ladies are five miles long dah doo dah doo day.
Run on each of seven legs by day
And on twelve pseudopodia by night
Bet my credits on a sentient Crinoid Looping Nag
Somebody bet on the Arcturian Lepidopteroid Sprite.

For someone this is going home.
Across the universe
Despite the handicap of multiple arms
Of crystalline matrix intelligences,
There is common experience
There is the mundane.

For someone this is home
Where the food must arrive on the eating stool
Where the freshly flayed flesh of small bugs
Is toasted lightly over an iodine laser furnace
Until tender.

The Aldebaran ladies sing this song dah doo dah doo
The Aldebaran ladies are a thousand miles long dah doo dah doo day.
Fly on silicon-based ornithoid wings by day
Slither on liquefactive caustic slime by night
Bet all ten of my boots on a cyberian hag
Or a gigabyte lover at the speed of light.

For someone this is normal
Resting quietly by an open freezer
Watching the news on the ice-screen
With a steaming glass of liquid barium
Cilia at rest, raised up on a pedestal of brass.

For someone life is like this
Frantic at the office pushing data
Into storage media with a prong,
Calling long distance with a wax megaphone
And a long throated warbling tone of voice.

The Aldebaran ladies sing this song dah doo dah doo
The Aldebaran ladies are five million miles long dah doo dah doo day.
Run on quantum drives by night
And on neutron zapper beams by day
Bet my crystal microchips on a easy shot
Threw my round trip ticket away.

Slipping into something greasy for a party
Where all the guests are eligible tetrasaurs
With furred masticating hammocks
And the wealth
Of a despot.

And we are free to go home
First to the sports complexes of Alderbaran
Then to the sweet backstreets of Earth.
First to the fleshpots of the flying cities
Where the flesh is sold disconnected
From its matrices of bone.
First to the idyllic grass banks of Ut
Where the grasses sing you to sleep

And sleeping invade your mind with rash promises of love.

 © BH 1998

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I had been looking to post a poem to celebrate the deep physics of the universe. Then I rediscovered this. First read in a darkened planetarium to ususpected audiences towards the end of the last century, it celebrates the diverse sentient life of all the known universe, at least in my own infundibulous mind. There is a tune to the chorus. I sing it sometimes. Privately.

Alphanumeric

Alphanumeric,
The expressions of the stars,
Too small for smiles
Twinkle in the heartstrings of Heaven

Then the spheres collide
And in colliding merge
Atoms through atoms.
Shells of energy sharing
Momentary electrons
All so unpredictable.
The music of the spheres
Is how the quanta interact,
How the talking cosmos
Whispers above the heat of nothing.
Then,
Passing in what was a moment,
In what is a moment,
Or will be,
The body of which we are part
Passes through itself.

A hand through an eye,
A heart beating on a heart.
All substance is empty
But for the atom’s heart
That nucleus of time.

© BH 2000

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This belongs in a poem cycle, Initialising, which lives here. It's finished at last after nearly twenty years. Ah well, it's an enduring universe.