A certain tungsten light
In filaments elemental
And burning with a dust
To dab upon the backs of bees,
To make them golden
As the source
That brought the all
From unseeing gloom
To vivid definition
And pleasure to the mind’s eye.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
There is a moment in the Cotswold year
When the rolling wheat fields
Summon the golden hue of the stone
On which all is built:
It is the baked brown of a village
Ripe upon the history of the hills;
The colour of summer made hay
Adhering to the sparse pasture
And bitten at by shaggy sheep.
It is light to warm the heart
And grow roses from the sun
Still kept at dusk
In the envoys of the warm bricks
Radiating in ochre moods
As the jasmine clad night enfolds
All within its sumptuous scents.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Stirring in the gentlest breeze
Wind chimes
Bob soundless:
I hear in their silence
The near fountain
Tappling cool in many droplets
To the pool’s perturbed rest
Of bubbles swayed
By concentric rippling
And breaths in pulsing evenness.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
He is brother to the painter
Though uses the green fingered touch
As brush stroke.
And his painting is pure transience
For no sooner
Has his intention
Made it to the page
Than the mother has her say
And brings her children
To cherished approximation,
No less perfect
Than the vision thought,
Imagined and sought
With the soil smudged hands.
And always the picture moves:
With bees sometimes
And sweet breezes
And lush imperceptible growth,
And butterflies on hot days
And of course
The season’s invariable work.
And each year
The page is pre-set
With innumerable ideas
But also blank for new,
And arrives as if it were the first
And not cyclic progeny
Of all time’s happenings
Manifesting in blooms
Among the foliage,
Provocative and colour flecked.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
From the brow
Of the wooded escarpment
Eyes are drawn
To the picture
In a vista’s reach
Into mists and the rolling plain.
And then a near rose
Beckons come close
To the petal’s crenellations
And breathes as sweetly
As the lover’s kiss,
Competes with all the faded distance
And offers the planted bed
Afire with flowers
And boughs drooping
Under the weight.
And then again the call
From between scots pine:
The wood
Creeping down the vale,
Hauling the mind away
To thoughts afar and blurring.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
In the evening
Bugs like particles
Fill the space
Between the trees.
They arrive to my eyes
Flitting entropy
Across shadow,
Carrying specs
Of light apparent,
Moving like tiny
Free reaching pieces
Of the hot sun
Setting in the west.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
There was a girl
Who fell asleep in a rose.
For a pillow she took a purple petal
And the blanket too
Was soft as a princess’s cheek.
And her dreams were fragrant
And brought about the soundest sleep
As if upon a leaf
All that might be
Could really come to pass.
And when she wakes,
For she will wake refreshed,
She will sip upon a perfect sphere
Held within a purple
Rose petal glass.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
In the crepuscular hour
When receding day
And encroaching night
Meet at the apex of magic,
All the white flowers
Are filled luminescent
So they appear to glow
Beyond themselves
Like vivid stars
Floating moon bright
In the gloom of dusk possibility.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
I walk in to the garden
A man
In clothing and footsteps
And thought
And then as the banks
Of perennial leaf
Touch my check,
Reach to meet
My enquiring hand,
And as my eye,
Like foraging bee
Dips and inspects,
And my ears,
Drawn to perceive
The wood pigeons
Breathing symphonies.
And as my nose
Catches strands
Of scent upon the breeze,
I change
From the modern, disinterested man
To the lover
Of my brother the leaf
And my friends
The birds and insects,
Quick-winged under foliage
And shadow
And proud to own the branch
And scrump the flower heads.
And thus I become
The green thing,
Half man, half herb,
Wishing for the heady scents
Of earthen loam
And soil must
And coolness of the mother,
Where the flesh of my heart
Might be lain in a hollow
To absorb the deep nutrient
And feel the root of forever.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
To the dusk
Flowers put their moods
In scented wafts
On which the eyes might close,
Deferring to the only open sense
Of the tantalised nose,
In which such enrichment
Is found in sweet distillate
Of earth and loam:
The mind somehow
Washed in perfumed sherbet,
Cleaned by something
Made perfect,
Alerted to the essential element
Volatile under the mid summer moon.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
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