national trust

Flirtatious Mid April

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In the countryside
Hawthorn flirts salacious,
Fluorescing champagne heady
In puffs of magic breath
Strung light upon the hedgerow’s
Dour skeletal winter branch,
Split and thankfully broken
By plethora encrustations
In scores of tiny white flowers.

In the town and village
The roads become boulevards
In which magnolia offer
Perfect molluscs
To the neat and leafless,
And cherry blossoms
Enlighten the spirit
Like wedding bells
And confetti heaped,
While winter jasmine,
In shocks of vivid yellow,
Leaps out and streaks
In lurid flares of flagrant disbelief.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

Perfection

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Perfection
In light’s revelation,

In the leaves’
Dying pyre,

In their fall
To the sodden ground

Or in the river’s
Swift transition.

Perfection
In the tree trunk,

In its conforming shape
Wound around

The order of being:
Beauty in naturalness

And spontaneities arrival
In art’s perfect work.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

© image Ann Truesdale, 2015

Beauty Happens

~ distilledvoice ~ 1 Comment

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Time
Comforts us
With its work
In sweeping curves
And the pebbles
Refined
To grain equality,
Sorted
In gradual conformity
To the long shore laws
Of water physical
And air scouring
And light,
Daily ultra violet.

As the globe spins
On smooth mathematics
And physics
Impregnated with a spark
Of living light

Beauty
Just
Happens.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

From Blueness

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Sea born rhythms
Arrive in blueness pulse
After blueness pulse,
And where the shallows
Show in pale shoals
And the globes of stones
Glow egg-like and shimmering,
The waves rise troubled
And breathe the air
To the new azure
Of their turbulent lungs,
Curling and introvert
In their wet work
Until the almost perfect
Curve of the rolling surf
Slips from the form and balance
Of its clothes
And seeks abandon
In bubble
And white water surge:
All its energy fragmented
And absorbed
In the froth and melee
Of interface.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

Mottisfont Brown Trout

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Lazy in the shallow stream,
Silken bellies tickling
The golden gravel.
Heads toward clarity
And clean new
Flush of gills,
Absorbent and capturing.
With but a gentle pulse
To keep stillness,
The shoal mimics
The sinusoidal weed,
In greens scribing wellings
And turbulence
Fingering the sinuous flow:
And leisurely,
They face forever
And the sweet taste
Of always coming,
Always there,
Always flowing,
Always there,
And the tranquil
Cool beginnings
In every moment.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

In The Garden Of Rooms

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One enters through a gate in an old stone wall. There is a peaceful lawn surrounded by herbaceous boarders leaning against wisteria capped, flint studded masonry. Clematis crowns in places: in pinks and white cataracts and green, gushing falls. Shrubs flower in every corner. Great blowsy peonies glimpse from their folds and white finery. Bluebells peep from the underworld and ferns cling to high crevices. At the far end of the sky ceilinged room is an opening in the brickwork. One enters via stepping stones tattooed with the slow engravings of lichens.
In the next room the light is altered and flowers are blue and purple in hue and temperament. Scents are heavy and cool. An archway of twisted and gnarled wood is split by the epoch of vine held flowers: fists unclenched and offering nectars on tiny, fleshy instruments: stamens, pollen clad and bumbled at by the benediction of bees.
In the next room there is the deep scent of peace held in a nook and grotto of silence. More are the plant beings. More is the air and humming of insects in nectarous impulse.
In the next there is a goddess of love who owns the still moment and offers more to those who dally in the mood of her wishes.
In the next there are doorways to secrets, and paths to hidden worlds and spaces clean as streams born new from bubbling wellsprings.
In the next there are deeper things for the mind to fathom.
In the next there is the heart of the world and a fountain to which the lips might sip life’s generous bequeathment and know yet more doorways to the fragrant beyond.
In the next room…….
And in the next…….