What's the word?

When tallow candles lit cave walls,

Imagination flicked through film.

On language looms we weaved our words

For the mind-marrowed images

Mapped by memory’s own spindle.

From gap to gap, from ridge to ridge,

From rock to rock, from stream to stream,

We worded: for the bleach of snow,

The brash-blirt of rain, frisking gusts,

Land-lashing gales, feet blattering

Through water pools, a halo mist

Burring the moon, spawning fish nest-

rudding pebbles, a lake-like cess

Fair floshed with reeds. The uncanny.

But what’s the word for when hail-spears

Kill bees in the mouths of flowers?

Don’t tell me it is providence.

Mie Ikeno's magic words

Rippling the hill-rim’s ragged face,

in craving-motion ecstasy,

the god-of-morning kestrel sears

to the red-back vole his eye spears.

The gold light magics Mie's vineyard

into view on the rounded slope

of hill, her fudo in Honshu,

where she grows Chardonnay, Merlot,

And Pinot Noir from Bourgogne;

Where she quests for the unique.

Grape clusters flourish to the eye

in neatly trellised lines of green,

the glisk and gleam of berry skin

stained plump purple by streaming sun.

Her ground vibrates with particles

of warm sunbeam-love for pure fruits.

In owl-light dusk her winery

is a twinkling ark where the gods

of conviviality sip

grace-glasses of notes-rich pleasure.

Now dusk blends into dazzling dawn.

Mie speaks a thousand magic words;

Her warm wine-love words ripen grapes.
Clouds heal in a circle of sun.

Crab-apple tree

Hoar frost nips buttery daffodil coronas.

Slender blooms quiver yellow in otter water.

The fleece of the fat fretting foot-sure lambs is lank.

Finger-cold winter tries hard to snub fluffing spring.

The black yellow-eyed cat teases a tabby tom.

Nesting crows bend deadfall twigs to their beaks;

They caw harsh collective complaints at the furry flirts.

Mottled mackerel clouds crest unmown hill meadows.

Brush-hairs of sunlight varnish the tree barks with gold.

The oval ruffle-edged crab-apple leaves open,

Pointed to tip, fresh keen green upsides dappling stone.

A fringe-stirring wisp lifts milky-cheese undersides.

The buds surprise us with crimson and salmon pink.

White-pearl and yellow centres clamour for the eye.

Bees will buzz soon to full voluptuous flowers.

Branches promise scented summer pendulousness.

Autumn’s ripening will bring apple-wrestling robins.

On the bliss of lake Spring's soul sings a song of sky.
Ripples through rushes run, restless with love's longing.

Will on the hop

The whorl unsteadies in the whirl and wharve.  

The skip of ruin catches Will on the hop.

Like a gasping fish hopeless on a hook,

He waits for the gaff to flip him lifeless.

Truth is, he shoulders a sea of sadness

That washes him wordless back to Stratford.

Not even the shepherd sun herding high

The sheepy sky with shining rods of light

Can spin him a syllabic shoal of smiles.

A shadow self in a leached spot of time,

He broods on death, a hope-to-gloom cascade.

Beckett reminds him, what is terrible

Is to have thought. Indifferent Godot

Has a long white beard. Misericorde.

Lear sits in his chair of state, a hovel

On a heath, undone, unaccommodated,

His majesty scarred by his maker’s mark.

Belated, he learns the value of love;

But Cordelia's death leaves us hopeless.

Will’s iced soul gives out on a wheel of fire;

Gods sport with the circle he can’t complete.

Will sees the Dane

He skips Sunday service, since the preacher

Speaks his prayers like a scholar’s parrot.

Far from the leas and lanes and rushy streams

Of Arden, he rows his boat in moonlight,

Past floating barges, and ghostly walled houses

On the banks of the Thames, haunted by echoes

Of Essex and the foul stink of dung yards.

Wash-water slakes the slack mudbank hollows.

Counting with the river’s rhythm and pulse

Of brimming thuds of tide on bed-fast beams,

He moors his boat, catching the pirr-pawing

Breath of breeze. He tastes his lexis, new words.

Before him a wall - moss, some weeds, grass tufts -

Sheening with wild waves of watery light.

Above the wall, a smoky face swabs slops

Of spilt beer, sweeps wet leaves; his hoary head,

The haze-fire spectre of the misty gloom,

Peers, purgatorial, from the shadow

Of death’s vale; and shines his lighted lantern,

His hair quiffed like a bull’s tuft by the breeze.

Quick as a tinkerbell gives on hard stone,

Will sees a dead unhomed bodiless Dane

Outgloom the frantic night in Elsinore.

Clouds shadow, the river slogs, a cock crows.

We go

Generating a procession

of wild lights through the shifty mists,

harnessed people pass in their cars.

They follow the invisible track

of stone-crunching horse-and-cart ghosts.

The barely visible road signs

are like the signs on zoo cages

describing captive animals.

Thumbed horns trumpet cacophony.

The sun begins to burn the haze

from our secret affinities.

In the tangle windscreened faces

interact promiscuously.

Neat steering wheels slide noiselessly

through soft fingertips of desire.

This primordial landscape speaks

advertisements making sentences

of consumption from wanting words.

Rising with the exhaust and mist

are the spirits of tracks now gone.

Waving to the rhythm of hooves

travellers on a mail coach go

with a gesture of beckoning.

We go - fish on this ocean floor -

Forever awake and yearning.

And forever agitated.

The hen picks

The hen picks at meal in the rain-washed yard.

The mud-japs on her wings are powdered hard.

The dog in the shed begins to complain.

A fox waits in the sheugh on the green lane.

The fox sees plump in his pin-pointing look.

The hen is a fish swimming to his hook.

Sunfall darkens with a black spit of shade.

Dew shines like a snow-flake on a hot blade.

They drink chilled stout after baling the hay,

And drain the dregs from the dugs of the day.

As the fox pads past the red metal gate,

They are mindless of a good layer’s fate.

Shell-shock

The ignorant called him ‘the mullah’,

And laughed out loud at his pain.

He knew Greek and could talk about Sulla,

As he walked his yellow Great Dane.

In Loos he had been a daredevil

Who wanted his men to beat fear.

Battalion called him ‘Wild Neville’,

Not caring the wear and the tear.

He sat on the fire step and smoked,

As the shells tore the trenches apart.

He was jaunty in step and he joked

Though terror was bursting his heart.

He found young Orr in pieces,

Head, limbs and a flayed trunk.

He crawled though the brains, blood and faeces

And shrank small in the mud in a funk.

At night he sweated and screamed;

He had to sleep with the light;

Young Orr would approach when he dreamed;

And call to him all through the night.

Talking ‘shell-shock’ is trite and banal.

This soldier had never been free.

He folded his clothes by the elder tree

And found peace in the long still canal.

God appears

God appears like a old druid between earth and sky.

The hourglass of existence intimates the end.

She says the life you have lived you can live again;

You will feel again the moments of pain and joy:

This gold dawn, these spring daffodils, this glassy dew.

I can turn your life over with this glass of dust.

Would you say, relieved, this is a godly thing? Or

Would you curse a god who promises nothing new? 

Dung

On his gray Ferguson 20

his still face set like a death throe

He had a weighty solid thought

that was also light and pleasing:

In China a farmer who sold

his vegetables in the town,

always carried home in his hand

a big heavy bucket of dung.

He divined that the world feeds on itself.

Its dunghill is its daily sustenance.

She clasps her hands

The news shows a child with black hair

Standing still in the desert sands;

There is no thinking in her stare;

To no end she clasps her small hands;

Bullets and bombs endanger her;

The gunmen are not far behind.

Immobile she stares at the void;

You can’t see the terror traces;

Don’t the macho men in pick-ups

With their rote male mythology

Know that a child is more sacred

Than any tin-eared theology!

Sleep slide

Her mind is like a bathroom filled with steam.

The mirror of her memory fogs up.

But the thought flashes like a scalpel glint:

‘The rhythm of the waves wears down the rocks’.

She thinks: ‘Gnomic nonsense for a last thought?

A lighthouse flickers in the moment’s ink.

A paramedic insists: ‘Stay with me.’

She thinks: ‘They speak clichés in Hades too.’

Her mind says: ‘In the beginning, the word,

The word was Ovid. No, it was Shakespeare?’

The siren alarms the merciless streets.

The passing lights are false flowers for the dead.

The hanging moon’s chain is about to break.

She sleep-slides into midsummer night's dream

And finds a clear stream where her skin can breathe.

She sculpts

She taps the sheets of night 

                              till the copper moon gleams;

She enamels the stars 
                                        into kettle brightness;

She spins her wheel to lacquer 
                                            the winking gravel;

She blows the stream into glass
                                   where the salmon skate;

She waterfalls the chords 
                                          the water lilies sing;
She wings swallows
                                  with bronze exuberance;

She petals her table-shadows 
                                       with flower-bud light;

She cools white wine in the wood 
                                        that loves the ocean;

She hand-sculpts a space for love
                                           in forever’s dawn.