©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
photograph
Retreat
Long gone the deep night
The quiet night
The night of magics
Whispered across the cosmos.
We make our own stars now,
Fill the world
With our blindness
Of blackness’s silent retreat.
©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
Legacy
We, the future
Froth upon the past,
Like lights girdering
The stanchioned and cemented rise
Of our skyward technological pride:
Apparently so different to our
Top-hatted and bonneted selves.
Yet sunk in the sump,
Our architecture founds itself
In skirts of steam empire
And Britannia
Greater than wishfulness.
I propose
The top hat to be
Present and near,
Not relinquished or pushed aside.
We are merely bareheaded
And not in the least bit changed.
©A Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
On The Mellow Mild
On the mellow mild
In the yellow breath
Beset the bare branch,
Spring flowers undid
Before the unfurling leaf
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017
Season’s Earthen Man
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
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
Uplift
Stem in its natural turgid curve.
Chin lifted by the sun.
‘Be my reflection,’ says the sun.
‘But be a flower, first and foremost.’
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Symbiosis
From dirt springs complexity
In the structure of flowers.
And to these
Come the elequance of bees,
Symbiotically bound
To the promiscuity
Of the plant’s future needs,
Yet self-serving on nectar’s
Seeping generosity
And suckling on plenty’s summer day
And its eternal rotations,
Both diurnal
And the season’s sleep
And interludes of wakefulness,
Through which the sun arouses
Generations of dormant seeds.
Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice
Lantern
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
The Gardener’s Art
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
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