Fragrant rose
Destroy me with weapon of your scent
Until I am laid bare
And broken into pieces
With but one sense left
And one breath
To offer you wholly.
Then let me die
In your folds,
Loosened from the world,
Myself thrown
Headlong into the softness
Of your beauty.
In the slowing moments
Of the settling day
Where stillness nears its absolute,
The honeysuckle dusk
Blooms in windlessness,
Prickling the senses
Of moths.
This is dying:
The day spent,
The light away
Beyond the curvature of the world,
The night
Not yet begun.
There are sounds:
Birds chuckling in the canopies,
The swishing of cars,
A throttling motorbike,
But all belong
In the settling,
All are borne upon the air,
All are called
By the magnitude
To witness,
To witness a death
More alive than words
Could ever carry or convey.
The morning is sweet
With the bird’s high ether,
Trill, and as full
As their abandon.
The air is warm and fragrant,
Infiltrated with wood smoke
And the earth’s low savour.
In a faraway glance,
The distance fades in to mist.
The morning in the breath is sweet.
In the sweet spring wonder
The bud of my life opens,
Synchronised with the buds
Of the earth.
The air contains me
And the quivering bird,
Its heart broken open,
Broken into song.
Morning is beautiful,
Fresh as imbibed breath,
Acknowledged
As spirits subtle vapour.
The scent is the hawthorn
Of my childhood,
When I first saw,
When my eyes were first open.
I am here again,
Bathed in deliciousness,
Open mouthed
That I should be.
Tell me there is no God
And I shall die in my garden
Breathing the wonder,
My brain obliterated
By the green spring
And the blackbird
Fluorescing
Music and magnitude
And wielding the shrill knife
Of beauty’s grievous wound,
And I will say nothing,
But put the pen
On the paper
And write my pitiful, joyous attempt
At the writing of it,
And die in my tears
And laugh in my tears,
And cry for the love
That kills me
As I feel
Its world-ending enormity.
The Scots pine glows red-skinned
In the morning light.
He is always there,
Watching over my life.
Sometimes he stands out,
As beautiful as beauty itself,
And sometimes he is invisible.
Today, his presence is called
And warbled by the birds
Hopping among his branches.
The breeze too has its say
In the vibration of a myriad needles.
I walk in reality, breathing the breath,
Feeling the body, seeing with the eyes.
The world is beautiful
For it happens
Despite the thoughts in my head.
The garden grows, expands into spring,
The foliage lush with promise.
The cat sits by the pond, under the
Blossoming trees, and amid daffodils.
He breathes the air too,
Watching, always watching,
Thinking not one moment beyond the
Moment he’s in.
The morning is fresh
Upon the dew soaked forms
Called to their greater love
In the body of the sun.
Everything is light
And as apparent as my condensing breath,
The world and my heart alive,
Brought by a transient glistening.
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
©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
distilledvoice 