Just saying the word
Is enough to quell
Its worrisome opposite.
You appear
To have swelled in breath
And buoyancy
Around the chest.
And more,
Your face is full
And your eyes
Are lit,
And your smile
Has spread
So a yellow sunrise
Wells
And the summer
Crests,
And you
Absorb
As much
As you reflect.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
For Mima
And the mother said
You can turn on my earth
And in a trice
My children
Will be upon
The glistening clods
To do their colonising
And consoling work.
And you may desert
The plentiful place
And turn it bland
With monoculture,
Dampen
The flourishing
With chemical
And beings augmented
And superior
All the while
Dashing yourself down.
But I will love you nevertheless.
And you may
Stricken the fertile
And the life giving,
Blemish it,
Injure it
And put it
To dust
And stone
And I will scar
For your learned eye
And then turn beautiful
With rest
And time
Fallow and forgiving.
And you may
Use me
Like your own heart used
And cut me
As your own blood flows
And deny me
As your own
Loneliness is made
In the crucible of your intention
And I will love you still
And whole
And love you
As only the land,
In its richness can
For killing is not mine
Nor
My children’s
And as the world turns
I will be
As I have been;
The force
The spirit
The energy
The lick of love
The empty space
The possibility
The lift
Behind it all,
The reason
And creativity
Rolling on, and endlessly on.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
In our madness
We would decline
The love
Of bees
Upon the land
And claim instead
Our MYOPIC
And SHORTSIGHTED
Neonicotinoid coated
Pounds and dollars.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Man’s Detritus
Cast high
With crisp seaweed
Under the bleaching sun.
All is soluble
In the end,
For the solvent
Washes twice a day
And more
In salt air
Corrosion.
Metal is eaten
Mottled bite
By rust smudge
And leafy fragmentation,
And plastic twine
Frays and becomes powdery.
The plastic bottle too
Loses integrity,
Degraded by the claiming sea,
Scrubbing every edge
To the smooth curve of bays
And roundish pebbles consistency:
Perhaps mocking us
For our solid forms
And legacies,
Our memories
Held aloft and alive –
To never die:
Or perhaps treating us
As equals on the path
To unbecoming
And the endless tide
Of things passed
And passing
To the voluminous being:
Then from dissolution
And constituents floating,
Reformation
Of something new and free.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Collectors these,
Unsteady flyers free
And amiable
In the gathering task
And work
To sip the draught
And honey heart
Of flowers
In their ripeness.
And somehow,
More the summer
For their busy
Singleminded focus
And adherence
To the well heads
Of fragrant,
Floral syrup.
And somehow,
More the flowers
As if fluoresced
In admiring presence,
For they ‘are’
For the bees,
Just
As the bees ‘are’
For the flowers.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Now buddleia’s
Lit fuses
Burn purple
For all
Denomination
Of kind bee
And for any
Which
Nectar’s flower
Is sweet and fragrant
Must
In the gathering need.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
After rain,
A moments solar respite
On the hydrophobic leaves.
Next,
To the light as wingtip air
And figures of flittering,
To the updraft
And the couplet spiralling
As high as love
And the mesmerisation
In mating’s
Centrifugal force.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Expressed in whorls
And soft tissue encased
And the fluid foot
In muscular reach,
Elegant as any
So long limbed
And herbivorous.
And what a beautiful
Tactile face
To sense
Moisture’s
Slick vehicle
And slide in silver grace:
The known world tasted
Through a moving salivation.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Because
I’m tender close
And nurturing
Your space
– As if my lover’s touch
Could Encourage
Your flush
To come again
And yet again –
My smiles and kisses
Are returned to me
In flowers festooned
And summoning.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
Are there really
Any wrong turns
Or mistakes
In the journey
Of our living
And in the writing
Of our life?
Perhaps
It is one way
Or the other,
Or another
Entirely different
Something else.
Who knows
And who is right?
Who can know ‘the truth’
Beyond their own
Or pass a judgement
Beyond the perception of the self?
And who is not alone
Upon the earth,
Solitary and singular
In every sense,
Sharing but paradox
And conundrum
Of the personal universe?
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
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