Softly treads March
Upon the sun-warmed earth:
A new green pallet
Strewn in daplings
Beneath trees
Still winter shod
But bearing
Blue sky and bud.
And Beneath:
A brief trumpeting
Of yellowness
Before the sky shades
With a canopy of leaf.
©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
A troop of goldfinch
Alight verbena,
Trapeze the bended stem
To plunder last year’s seeds
Now dry in the sheaf.
I recall last season’s butterflies
Tasting nectars,
Opening their sun drenched wing
Upon the purple heads,
And marvel now
At brotherliness:
Symbiosis motive in the world:
Investments dividend returned
In grateful harvests born
And born, and born again.
A Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
The great man of seasons
Wakes at the apex of deep night
And winter’s shrunken solstice.
He tries the cracks of his eyes
In January’s skeletal underworld,
Perceives only the dormant trees
Upturned and rooted in freezing mists:
Their faraway lives in the ethers of dreams.
In February, time stretches.
The birds summon the bulbs.
Dawn steals two minutes from night
And dusk lingers, pinches two more.
By the seventh day
All the minutes of the month
Come as one welcome approach,
Snowdrops forerunning,
Outriders of the coming urge.
The earthen man stirs from slumber
In the barren mud,
Sits up in the flower bed
As a myriad of poking spears
Aimed at the newly sprung sun.
The coronations of daffodil kings
Are coming. As are the meteoric
Gear shifts of light,
And growth’s succulent mirroring
As air goes fresh to the breath
As is clean and clear to the head
In spring’s minting of newness.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
Late butterfly
Basks in opportunity’s
Cloudless blue.
Dew-cold shadows creep
But in the light
It’s still summer.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Dawn slides oblique
Between the flat shadows
Of night’s quiet layering,
Piques the corn-ripe air
Spiriting earth musk
From the damp leave’s
Cool-blooded undergrowth.
A chill hint
Of vapour in the breath,
Bumble bees slow
And sleepy,
Bird twitter in the bush,
The west leaf in day light’s tilt,
The east leaf, still suckling
In dim pockets
And grottos half shut.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The night rain
Loads the morning foliage,
Hauls each stem down
With a sheen.
The damp leaves
Lick the air,
Exfoliating pungencies
And sap soaked humidity,
Hunkering in rich breath
Of the wood scent,
Releasing stomatal volatiles
And chlorophyll astringencies,
Tempered by the nectars
Of bedraggled flowers,
Lolling before the sunshine
Straightens them.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
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
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
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