Fathomless

The stars prick my skin, they sing in the synapses in my head and are the sound I have come to call silence over the years; the sound that the vicar ushered in on Sundays when my knees ached cold and I longed to be outside. I thought god was in the sky, I thought he spoke in the shades of blue and purple on warm summer nights with the windows thrown open, I thought he heard the whispers of my heart and loved me all the same.

But he was not the god that the vicar spoke of in his voice that cracked dry and parched as the bible he read from, not the god that separated the sinners from the saints. He was not the god of Sunday school that would send me to hell for lying just once. I heard about those gods and couldn’t bring myself to believe in them. He was my god, he wrapped his warm blanket of acceptance around me and I was never alone. He was like my grandfather who grew peas in his garden where the sun never stopped shining; made of kindness and a warm absent minded affection. He was some wordless mystery, a language I had known once but could not voice. I would talk to him and stare at the sky and feel as fathomless deep as I believed him to be, sharing our secrets, knowing that the other knew and that no one could touch that.

And whenever it was that I stopped talking to my god was when I stopped believing that I could be loved for no reason, in spite of everything, regardless and for free. Perhaps it came with the death of my grandfather and the sudden knowledge that there was a world outside my own that did not know or speak of these mysteries that lay just beneath the surface, invisible. It takes so much time to find them again when they are just there, glittering in silence and calling your name.

I do not know what my ancestors found in the sky but I think I can understand. I find silence there and it speaks volumes, it soothes me, it makes me forget my sorrow and remember, not joy, but peace. It makes me feel fathomless deep again and that there are words on the very tip of my tongue that I have forgotten how to say. That place that lies in between the high and the low is the voice of god, the goddess, the ones who still live in the place beyond words and know how to speak my name so that I hear it everywhere.

In between the words, in between the stop start rhythms of life, in between midnight and morning, in between my tears and my laughter there is peace, just peace and it’s what my soul has longed for all these years.

The next time I see my grandfather will be in the faces of my children who will be born wordless and still know the language of the gods. And I will watch them listening and wonder at how life cycles around.

The moonlight sweeps across your face

The moonlight sweeps across your face, silently, like some inaudible tide. She washes and washes at your boughs, at the lines of your strong features, carved deep, till it seems they are smoothed away, dissolved by sleep, and your face is the face of the moon.

Her tides have quietly carried you away. Sea dreamer, I wonder could I still count the times I have watched you like this on my fingers. Could I have mapped the course of this vessel in the lines on my hands, hands that trace your shadowed outline in the dark?

You breathe deep as if drawing me in and under the swirling warmth of sleep, but she does not come for me, does not claim me as she has claimed you. And I lie in the waiting darkness, shadowing your face like a cloud across the moon, illuminated for a moment before I am pulled on and gone.

My memories are like faded maps now, beautiful translucent pictures in my mind, but the lines are blurred I cannot find my way back to the places we were, the ones we were when we were there. They have shifted, subtly, sweetly, swept away by just the softest of rain. Gone are the blossoms that were falling on the day I left. Now with the scent of autumn coming on, the promise of cold bright nights that snap like frozen twigs beneath my feet, instead blooms the streetlights reflected on wet pavements where the shadows grow from out of the cracks.

I thought better than this, better than to come here in this way. As I was spiraling home through the air, down, descending down, I thought that memories are sweet; hands held beneath the table, your eyes creased at the corners, the scent of the flowers you gave me with that smile on your face telling me there was more, but they should be kept that way, preserved like a butterfly behind sheet glass and kept away from these changing winds.

But as I watch you tonight I know why I had to come here again and sail with you a while longer, you who just held me when the world shook and illuminated the shadows with your smile.

Ashes scattered like seeds in that cycle that is onward, upward, upward, caught between the ground and the sky. You ask, ‘isn’t there more?’ Well isn’t there? Ash and earth, what precious things from dust, forming silence from whispers.

The old ones come as the old ones will. They come in the quiet; they come like flow, in the arc and twist of smoke, in the billowing of cloth on the breeze. They come branching, curving in their way that grows through, treading these ancient pathways of natural law. This is how they come; this is how they are called. Arriving, drawn towards the magnetic pull. Like drawing like, following the path of least resistance, following the river and its steady stream. The fortune of the undertow.

It comes from here; the base, the centre, the heart of creation, pulling form, seat of strength. The foundation, the key stone, is here. Flowerlike, you have seen it. But where there is shame there can be no free flow. These are the sacred places of the Goddess. This is where we draw from; this is the seat of power. Magnetic pull and pulse, like a moon reflected in a silver chalice. Like an opening flower that knows only the light of darkness.

No Stormy Seas

No stormy seas can hold me. I am the wave, I am the voice, I am the rhythm singer taking down the darkness. No cloud will block the light, no vast lake of darkness; I am the brightness, the fullness, the zenith and return.

I am the answer in your wishes, and the hope that dances bright about you. I am the stormy seas and a lake so still it holds the stars.

And we with hearts like fire, turning all we see to dust and back again, growing life from the ashes. We the strong and brave ones that dance forth the very darkness and swallow your life whole. We the secret women, the ancient ones who came through, washing over and back, over and back the smooth stones of your mind. We reflect light and share it, leaving laughter in our wake.

Sea of lights, vast ocean, we may not tame the darkness but hold the sky for a while, just a while.

It seeps over me, the creeping dawn; it seeps like liquid beneath the door. It comes and comes over heralding itself like a lark calling in the night. Heat and the smell of spice and a voice raised in prayer. A head held high to god; she is a mystery unfolding, she is my cause and I am bound to her. I would hold a star in my hands to graze its brightness. I would hold life, I would hold and be held.

in between

We were not silenced we merely spoke in between the words. We merely moved to the side line and became invisible. Stepped as if into the mists and shadows and were gone so easily. So easily that it seemed we were never there. As if by some trick we just stepped into the shadows and the spaces in between. Becoming not one thing or the next, not one meaning or another, but in a space of our own, wordless and unknown. We had to, we had to move for time shifts and becomes new things. It becomes harder then softer, quicker then slower and the world then became a place we could not survive. Not in the black and white world. Not in a world where meaning and silence explained us gone. We moved then into the cracks, into the pauses, into the silences. We talked in whispers to those who remembered. We were the ripple on the wheat and the turning of the leaves. We became vaporous, insubstantial; un talked of, but remembered in the dormant memory.

We, like flowers, fall with rain. We are the wild patterns of life now, no spectacular show, no fireworks or blazing truth. We remain in the in between, in the shape of things to come, in the high arc and the low ebb. We watch and wait and take form when we can but whisper constantly to those who would listen, to those who would hear.

Nonsense?

She heralds the darkness with a call that is at once sweet and strange. A dimming of light, turning as if in autumn.

The crisp sweetness tasted then, the sharp and whiteness, acid, acrid, till it’s done.

We can but speak in whispers, no louder than this. No more the broken dreams of memory, only the undertow of home. Voices and laughter; the aching sweetness that is, that was, that can be and will.

It is home to you now, home to your soul; the chaotic gypsy hearts we breed. Curled and curved around you with so much to do and so many places to belong. We are the sweet tales, we are the night visions, we are the blessed acres of space where wildness may still bloom, the ever free who would surround thee.

If it is a memory then let it be the wash of truth that bares your soul. Ruthless distortions swept aside to leave you bare. Whatever we do, whoever we are, has reason and though there are no mistakes that may not be forgiven, all will be accounted for and better understood. What it means to you who holds on, who would avoid its eyes, what it means is to be counted, accounted as the responsible.

Forgiveness, disillusion, the one we thought you were not changed but grown.

Stand by your convictions and let them bloom, understand them, speak for them. Life is a steady stream that goes where it will. Who are you to move against the tide? Who could?

Bran

Speak of the sea; the grey rolling foam, the washing, washing water that comes as she does. Speak of the sea and all her silences, great as she is, quiet as she may be, of all her memory, of all the places she may rest. She is the greatness and the void. Stories that hold memory, that tell something in their telling, something more subtle between the lines. Between one meaning and the next a hidden history unfolds. Pages between the ones we see.

Dark hair, like night falling between my fingers, like night falling as a silken cloth over the land. Bright eyes upward turned to heaven. He could touch it with his hand, he could hold it in his palm.

Into Brilliance

Sweet bliss

Remember this

With the sweet hours fading

Into brilliance

The curve of your hand

As it holds your own heart

And the endless distance of heaven

Arcing into eternity

One and the same

We are

What the Sisters Whispered

The roses hold the moonlight, the memory of it. The blush of their hues like a tale now easily told among sisters.

Among the sisters and what they whisper.

If you tell me, if that could be its way, one to another, but mouth to mouth, word to word there is a change, subtle but real.

Know that some things are made beyond the reach of words and must be understood in the heart, in the blood, deep within the very marrow. Not spoken, but known. It goes beyond belief. It is what is.

Arianrhod

">There is an eight spoke wheel that turns and weaves in a distant place, far beyond where the eye can see. Some say it is of silver, spinning high and cold as the moon, some of wood from the 8 different trees of our seasons, but others say that it is cast of iron, rusting slowly on its axis. She, the great spinner of all, sits and spins us like thread, and the iron of her wheel is woven deep into our blood. Rust, dust, iron from the mother of all. Her lessons are not easy or sweet, but they go deeper than bone, to a time when we were but stone and mud.

Ahrianrod is the cold aloof light of a million stars and the very depths of the ocean in which they say she drowned. But then men are want to say these things, telling stories of how craftiness and female cunning can come to nought but a bad end, metering cause and effect out in neat little parcels. But life has a way of unfolding that is not so neat or seemingly just. Perhaps she did drown, surrounded by all her madness and wickedness the way they tell it, but we believe she swam with a different tide, untouchable by the currents of life as you or I would walk it. Ahrianrod was star born and star bound. She was as cold as the empty atmosphere just beyond the curve of the earth but as warm as a midwinter night, when the glow comes not from the brashness of the sun, but from the bright points of light we see in one another as we gather round to celebrate the ones we love at these times. She was not and could never be defined by the laws that the men tried to tie her story up in, she was instead as dark as the dark moon, untouched by her brother sun. But even there, there is some discrepancy… a magical child, some argument as to who the father was and Ahrianrod as ever, too proud and distant to say, as if the words would diminish her somehow.

Your Love

Her breath is warm

The downy hairs like a baby

Soft and golden, you are

Trying to survive in this world

With your heart on your sleeve.

Your breath, crying to the nape of her neck

A salt pool where it gathers

In the sweet unspoken places

Your love fills up

Moonlight

Wrap yourself around the moon,

As if she could become

A part of you

And walk by your side

Moonlight on a shuttered street

What would she whisper

What secrets confide

In the dizzying dark hours

After all the bars are closed

Pacing you like a dream

A secret sigh

Walking you home

As the cars go by

Still

You can still love someone, even after a million years, even after you’ve found a million reasons not to.

And you can travel far, as far as you can to see the sun rise thousands of miles away, out of the sea like a golden god, rising in a high arc across heaven.

There are a million places to go, but when it’s in you, when it is you, it comes with you and will not be bleached out by the scorching sun. It cannot be burned away nor drowned in the ocean or frozen by the driving rain as you walk home from work. And it can’t be disguised, dressed up in the face of another. Not convincingly, not for very long.

It never dies, never, never, never dies. Just stays there like a silver lined hope, no matter what.

What the ground has said

What the ground has said is but a memory to me now. It has no cause but its own. It speaks in cracks and dampness, it whispers in the grass. It is and can be no other way. In the shards of its broken sleep it stirs, sleeping neath an orange gold mantle turned to white in winter.

What the ground has said is but a memory to me now.

But for my feet on the cold earth, taking the coldness into my bones like a root feeding up my spine and into my head.

I remember what the ground has said.