As you recline on the freshly mown grass
With your eyes closed
And the sunshine
Warm on your face,
Tell me there is no heaven.
And with birdsong
In every angle of your ears,
And the sweet breath plentiful
And touched by the scents on the breeze,
Tell me again, there is no heaven.
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 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.
Moving in the garden
My body is free
As new expectant air,
Mellow in the coming.
The push of bulbs
Rises through my limbs,
The sap called by the source
To come and become.
Is there better than being,
Just being?
The gnats know,
Ascribing their wisdom
In choreography
Written on the breeze
Where the afternoon is nothing
But a pale yellow light.
©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
On the mellow mild
In the yellow breath
Beset the bare branch,
Spring flowers undid
Before the unfurling leaf
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
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