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
writing
Tree Happening
A tree casts its multitude seeds to the world: ‘I give you this,’ it says to life, ‘for you to wear. My children are the footprint in which you tread, the clothes in which the future beds and once again emerges.’
‘All beings are thus: loaded with infinite ways in which life might balance on ‘nows’ narrow path. And by the wayside, the seeds as yet unlocked: not wasted, but the glad price of reality’s weave and weft upon happening’s wide and well trodden map.’
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
August Morn
Dawn slides oblique
Between the flat shadows
Of night’s quiet layering,
Piques the corn-ripe air
Spiriting earth musk
From the damp leave’s
Cool-blooded undergrowth.
A chill hint
Of vapour in the breath,
Bumble bees slow
And sleepy,
Bird twitter in the bush,
The west leaf in day light’s tilt,
The east leaf, still suckling
In dim pockets
And grottos half shut.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
The Night Rain
The night rain
Loads the morning foliage,
Hauls each stem down
With a sheen.
The damp leaves
Lick the air,
Exfoliating pungencies
And sap soaked humidity,
Hunkering in rich breath
Of the wood scent,
Releasing stomatal volatiles
And chlorophyll astringencies,
Tempered by the nectars
Of bedraggled flowers,
Lolling before the sunshine
Straightens them.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Multiverse
Some peer for heaven’s star-load,
Grappling with infinite mathematics
And paradox strewn colourful
Beyond the impossible reach of the mind.
And yet others peer close as home
And find the universe layered
In unending planes, thick with reality
In which life forms inhabit.
To look is to exclude the rest,
Understanding found in the narrowing
Of the pin point eye, alive on the observed
But unconscious of other and else.
What dwells where we cannot see,
Where our minds have yet to examine,
Where are backs are turned
And worlds are yet to be seen?
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
Cotswold Summer
There is a moment in the Cotswold year
When the rolling wheat fields
Summon the golden hue of the stone
On which all is built:
It is the baked brown of a village
Ripe upon the history of the hills;
The colour of summer made hay
Adhering to the sparse pasture
And bitten at by shaggy sheep.
It is light to warm the heart
And grow roses from the sun
Still kept at dusk
In the envoys of the warm bricks
Radiating in ochre moods
As the jasmine clad night enfolds
All within its sumptuous scents.
Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016
Wind Chimes
Stirring in the gentlest breeze
Wind chimes
Bob soundless:
I hear in their silence
The near fountain
Tappling cool in many droplets
To the pool’s perturbed rest
Of bubbles swayed
By concentric rippling
And breaths in pulsing evenness.
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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