A dove coos
In the the bell tower,
Soft and throaty
And warm
For the chicks
Loved in to the nest.
–
The Scots pine,
Lofty in the graveyard,
Stands still and magnificent
Exuding presence,
Shining with silence
And oblivious of time.
–
The woodland,
Dotted with ewes
And skewed graves stones
Chatters
In warble and whistle.
In the canopy
Birds flap and flutter unseen.
The sky breathes
Moist upon the land,
Kisses the newness
Of just-unfurled leaves,
Liquefying the air
Until dew drop and rain drop
Dampen tree bark
With dark mottled absorbency,
And the haze of cow parsley
Scents the sky’s earthward reach
With its Milky Way.
Shriller and lubricated,
Bird call conducted
Through the denser fluid,
Cuts the sweet cloak
Of draping mist,
Amplified inside
The descended cloud,
Defined by its weight
And closeness.
And from the delicate canopy,
Born in perfect verdancy,
Coalesced drops patter,
Splatting loose and percussive
Upon fresh nettle leaves
Yearning for light.
In the moistened autumn air
Morning time is late,
Shuffling from the lengthening night
Through swathes of disintegrating leaves
Let loose the life that gripped
So urgent and productive
To branches now revealed.
Rooks craw in skeletal beech
Where only a smattering of bronze
Tenacious leaf, still reluctant
In the wind, cling jewel-like
And fluttering. And other birds
Pick at the glut of berries
With the needle of their song.
Somewhere in this,
Where the sky morphs
And reveals and holds
The whole landscape,
Walks the photographer,
Drinking in the all that he perceives,
Almost convulsing
With each perspective seen,
Almost pained by the utter beauty
Unfolding in fleeting perfections,
That even if time were his to own,
He could never hope to capture.
The world is dripping
Browns and auburn golds
As russet leaves, untethered
From life’s lunge and thrust
– Summer’s widened light –
Let loose the season’s
Fall, in energy unclasping
The matter made,
As all shrinks away
And narrows toward formlessness.
Autumn flies basking
In the last, late light,
Absorbing the nutrient
Of the sun’s capacity,
Accepting a photons’ score
Of energy,
Recharging in the beneficence
Of a warming and wondrous gift.
The sky is blue
And deep
And impenetrable,
Absorbing my gaze
Which finds no purchase
In its azure nothingness,
Finds nothing
But lazuline, cerulean flawless flatness,
In which the cumulous materialise,
Condense in forever morphing forms;
There in expansion or contraction
Wispiness or burdensome bruising
Clotting before rain drops are birthed,
Or reconsidered by the air’s
Subtle hold, and withdrawn
Into the invisibility of blueness
And the dimensionless constant
Reaching beyond the reaching mind.
ⓒBen Truesdale f2020
©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
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 