Unite the world through sharing poetry

I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately…the difficult life she had, and I wrote this for her.

For Julianna

Rough memories, combed and carded
By guttering flame, with silent prayer
Warp of winter sleet and weft of hearthstone
She wove them into one tale, her sojourn
As black, and pale, and ruddy wool
Death, dreams and bloodred birth
So she kept her hands spinning the years
Rough and cracked with her patterned life.

The New Arthurians

Morris walked the long French roads,
straight, poplar-spired, golden-landscaped,
in search of transcendence in stone.
At Amiens, Louviers, Evreux, Chartres
The memory-filling group went staring
Up at the surging lines, the weightless
Thrust and rise of the masoned buttress,
Aisles flamboyant or Norman arched
Transept fronts and mighty Gothic naves.
Pacing the quayside at Le Havre
Morris and Ned Burne-Jones
Pledged themselves to making art
Turning their backs on holy orders.

He knew already he was marked for her:
Guinevere: passionate, dazzling, austere,
A helper, a lover, a traitor,
A loyal companion, a faithless wife.
And love was all to Morris. Physical,
Sexual. He felt its energy beating
His heart, driving him onto a woman
Just as he’d walked with bleeding feet
In broken boots to see those spires,
So he worked without deflection,
Punching his head to oust corruption,
Towards a life espoused to the ideal.

She was a girl from the servant class
Rossetti had drawn. Tall, quiet and cool,
She glanced down at Morris’s humble gifts
As he gazed upwards to gauge her response,
Heart-intent on her motionless face
Her dark and remarkable beauty.
Money whispered, he knew his power
And everything was possible.
He made her a queen in flowing robes,
Crowned with flowers in plaited hair
In the ancient orchard amongst the daisies
Two babies cried and grew and toddled
While she neatly needled his designs
Claiming rest; was ill with nerves
When he stormed and raged she ignored him,
Sneering and hardly speaking.
Soft in silks she shunned his kisses
Lying in wait for the snake in the grass
Wanting the beast who was really a beast,
Longing to smash the mirror.

I don’t know where I came across this poem but I’m sure it could help to unite the world!

Not all giant trees
Are broken by the storm;
Not all seeds
Find no soil to strike roots;
Not all true feelings
Vanish in the desert of man’s heart;
Not all dreams
Allow their wings to be clipped.

No, not everything
Ends as you foretold!

Not all flames
Burn themselves out
Without sparking off others;
Not all stars
Indicate the night
Without predicting the dawn;
Not all songs
Brush past the ears
Without remaining in the heart.

No, not everything
Ends as you foretold!

Not all appeals
Receive no response;
Not all losses
Are beyond retrieval;
Not all abysses
Mean destruction;
Not all destruction
Falls on the weak;

Not all souls
Can be ground underfoot
Ad turned into putrid mud;
Not all consequences
Are streaked with tears and blood
And do not show a smiling face.

Everything present is pregnant with the future,
Everything future comes from the past.

Have hope, struggle for it,
Bear these on your shoulders.

I wrote this today, in a blue mood I guess. But I wanted to share the melancholy of lost love. It’s something we can all relate to, and it stings us all, no matter who we are and where we’ve been.

Rewinding Memories

Molly ambushes yesterday’s news
From her hideout under the deck
Sprawls over now forgotten headlines
Then leaps sideways as they sweep off
Into the neighbour’s forsythia
To shroud it like a half-finished Christo.

I watch your sleet-starched shirt
From the kitchen window
Flapping a staccato semaphore
A message I imagine you’re sending me
From wherever it is you’ve gone.

I go back, press rewind, then play
And gorge on your face
Pause, and freeze a close up
Of my last kiss
The one you blew me from the stage
I cannot yet bring myself
To listen
To your voice.

Nothing but our own
heaviness
silences like this.
Numbed in applause,
the last Amen translates
to shuffles
in the aisle, arms
struggling with wraps.

Hand brushes
a knee, but the gesture’s
past heeding. How resolutions
blur as frost forests
the windshield. Too weary
to scrape, we watch
breath run down in rivulets
on weeping glass.

To shake off the
Dust of human ambition
I sit on moss in
Zen robes of stillness,
While through the window,
In the setting sun
Of late autumn,
Falling leaves whirl
And drop to the stone dais. —Tesshu Tokusai

This is Florence’s favourite poem. She knows it by heart. We recited this poem in the waiting area of the Marks and Spencer sale, while Ashley was trying on trousers.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Hey all- I’ve been busy with school and work, but I’m still working on my book. I now have just over 13,000 words. Keep a look out, I might be able to finish before Christmas since I’ll have some time off. I’ll keep you updated..

Anyone like Noyes? I’ve loved The Highwayman for as long as I can remember. It’s nearly impossible to not read the whole thing once you start.

When you are old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

W.B Yeats, Irish