By Paul Morris
The podcast currently has 506 episodes available.
Walking May
Walking
the flower
garden,
this opening
of spring,
listening
to birdsong,
the wind
and trees
that sing,
for the sky
is so blue
a blessing
this May,
for June
is approaching
and summer
will be here
For ever
and more.
For Today.
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Spring in the Garden of May.
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Even if I…
Even if
the sun,
I feel
were blind,
I would like
to hold
your face
in the quiet
of my hands,
and trace
just once,
my fingers
upon
the tributaries
and streams,
of the life
that has become
the beautiful
you,
to feel
a thousand stories,
journeys
and emotions,
joining
a stream,
a flow,
of stars,
to a river
of journeys,
that I cherish
in wonder
that I feel,
in the music
of living
and life,
that is
born
in me
with you.
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For if
there is,
truly,
a Spring
in winter
let me drink
then,
deeply of your
beautiful eyes
to see the dawn
of morning blue,
for laughter
is the sunlight
of March
that rises,
beautifully
in the blossom
of life
that is
simply being
and walking,
the path
with you.
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They
He pulled. Felt her hand in his. Remembering her taste. Her smell. The way her body cleaved into his. His into hers.
Mustiness.
Earth.
Wonder.
Urgency.
The earth crumbled around him. It matted his arms, legs and lower back.
His hair.
His beard.
He sat up. Felt the dull ache, the throb of life to be given fill his awakening being with her.
To her.
She could see him now. Lifting himself out of sleep. His own dream wrapped around him. She released his hand, reached over and kneeled beside him. She cleared the soil, earth, pebbles and stones from his feet, his legs. Saw his rising. Spread her warming hands and cleared away the earth and winter from his torso, his arms.
His eyes were still closed. She caressed his face. His beard. And combed his hair with her fingertips. His breathing, before, once shallow in intervals of time, slow and season, deepened as he trembled with the beginnings of power that infused him.
His eyes filled her soul with his form. Half known. Half remembered. A sense of knowing and possession filled her heart and senses.
They joined as the sky lifted.He the earth. She its Spring.They pushed and pulled and bound and knotted the spaces born in life and time between them.
A circle of birds arose.
Like leaves re born from yesteryear. They too combined in runes and patterns remembered long and hard, instinctively opening, outside, inside, and up and to the light above them.
And in memories, coupling and murmurations, she and he, the two, entwined again and again, the great pulse of life,
Again and again, they lifted seas and sons; the cycles born of time and place between them.
It began to rain.
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February Afternoon
The sun sets
long shadows,
cast the distance
upon the broken
garden wall
But amongst
the cracks,
the silence,
beneath
the settling
dusk
of late afternoon
A blackbird
sings, his voice
catching
my tears
one by one
as softly,
gently
the rain begins
to fall.
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S(he)
He was awakening. The stiffness of sleep held him tight within its arms. The winter stars were wrapped in sheathes of time about his legs and lower body. From somewhere outside of himself he could feel a growing sense of urgency. A warmth. A remembering. He needed to remember. Wanted to remember. But a great fog of darkness still held him. Whispered to him. Wanted him to remain within it.
Somewhere. Somewhere.
‘Here.Here.’ He could sense his own voice outside of himself. A movement beyond his own vision. A feeling. No more.
Shapes formed around him. He felt a tightening within him. A gnarled, knotted network of strength that rooted him down began to pull up from deep beneath him. Answering a deeper call from the pressing darkness around him.
There it was again. And again. A pulse. A throb. A release of heat into what he could feel awakening above him.
‘I must move,’ the thought, if that was what it was, an impulse, a command, came into his consciousness. He felt the pull upwards. Strong. Ancient. Remembering.
He knew he lay between roots, trunk, branch, leaves to be and the great emptiness of sky.
Something was tracing upon his still bound hands. Patterns. Repeated. And again.
‘Runes,’ the shapes, became sounds. The sounds, familiar, became repeated, and grew into words. The darkness around him began to thin. Began to dissipate. Light, for that was what he remembered, slipped between the stars and spread in warmth around him.
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She (1)
She was not sure when it started. A cold day perhaps. Long shadows. Early evening. She could feel in her memories the wind blow cool from the mountains around the valley. A shiver of possibilities across the lengthening dusk.
Maybe it was then. When the first stars blinked across the skies, the first street lights flickered and then failed.
‘Yes. Perhaps it was then,’ she thought to herself.
She closed her eyes. Lay still and quiet. Felt once again, the first time it touched her.
Fingertips across her face. A breath through her untangled, uncombed hair. Two hands like ripples along each side of her spine.
She felt naked. Known. Not wanted.
Needed.
Essential to something outside of herself. It was not a violation. More a justification of her being there at that moment and now.
A now that seemed to stretch from then until the now. The here where she lay under the freshly mown grass,the open blue sky and the rim of trees that nodded and whispered in the late spring breeze.
‘Yes,’ she admitted quietly to herself once again, ‘this, what is now was born from then.’
She reached out with her hand and blindly sought his own. She felt through each new blade of grass, felt the soil crumble, warm and fecund through her fingers, smelled him close to her, his breathing, his mustiness and then found his. She caressed the palm of his hand. Followed the lines and marks, the calloused knots and branches of experiences that were written in his outstretched fingers.
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A Sleepy Summer Afternoon
It’s a lazy,
sleepy afternoon,
the villages
are empty,
flowers,
in colours
of summer,
curtsy and nod
in the baking sunlight, radiating off walls
and shimmering rooftops, and, as if uplifted,
a single buzzard flies
and swoops overhead.
It’s so warm,
the distance
is translated,
from far and away,
to the here
and now:
a band of
light above
the winding road,
the asphalt, soft,
under the lens
of light,
a magnifying glass
to places and oases
beyond the peel
of church bells,
that mark,
in a sudden silence,
the slipping
of hours.
And it is here
that I stop,
and step off the path,
lean over the fence,
across the summer gardens,
the flowerbeds,
the well kept lawns,
abandoned lawnmowers,
the hiss
of water sprinklers,
the hurried slam
of descending sun blinds,
and here it is
that I stop,
and look at the world
from the side.
And beyond
the crumbling brick wall,
the crooked apple tree,
bending like time,
over the broken gap,
the open doorway,
where butterflies
dance and tarry,
I see further than myself,
the slow patterns
of the wind
and seasons,
the trembling shadow hands
of leaves,
and deeper,
further into the folds
and valleys
of the distances
that await me.
But of course,
I am blind.
I can see
no further
than the fingers
of my left hand,
the hand that feels
the breeze
flow thorough
and across it.
The memories
and whispers
of former times
gather and press
around me,
shaping, waiting,
listening
to my breathing,
hearing the dance
of my heart
as I slowly feel myself slipping,
stretching
and falling
through.
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She could see their forms shiver and shimmy. She stepped closer. Her self belief was not unsurprised by what she was seeing: two people bound together by time, place-and not a little love.
The wind whispered again, hushing her doubts aside as she stepped closer towards them. She could see through their opaqueness: the edge of the lagoon, and the grey-blue waters still and quiet under a fresh western sky. Beyond, and stretching behind them, was the beach itself, like a great arm separating sky and sea, past and present, now and then.
They turned as if they could see her, he beckoned her towards them both. His eyes full with belonging, his hand waving, almost urgently.
She walked again, closer, and yet closer, leaving Cassie whimpering further and further behind.
She walked past them, they flickered and faded as she went by, and as she looked at the gravestone, standing and yet tilted, deep in long grass and covered with tears of moss, lichen and split into a mosaic of cracks and fissures. She reached out and touched the cold, wet, damp stone and rubbed the green fur of centuries, away from the inscriptions and read:
‘Mohune, Emily, b. 1746 d. 1796. Mohune, John, b. Unknown,d.1796.’
She read further, and in doing so, dared not to look at the two figures standing behind her, but feeling them step closer, she read on:
‘Life giveth and taketh, returning all who live to the beckoning sea, waste not your days, and heed the wind, for your chime of hours, is what is left to be.’
She felt a mere whisper, a breath of wind behind her back. She turned slowly fearing what she might not be able to see.
John and Emily stepped back from the gravestone. They had walked from the wreck, left the wounded and broken, the bloated dead that lay strewn across the beach, their bones shattered, their organs pummelled, their bodies abandoned beneath the unforgiving skies, across the breached and storm -battered berm.
It was too much, knowing they had each other, but others had lost their own lives, slipping through the storm that had separated what was alive to that which never would be. One to the past, the other to a future neither would remember.
They walked up the beach, to the edge of the marram grass, across their spiky crests, to the dunes that rippled and fell until they came into the lee of the wind, and the pathway that led them through the silver birches and bristles of Scot’s pine, through sheltered oases of silence towards the nestling church.
‘I’d not remembered this,’ she said,’Our names must be here, unless this is finally the now where we both belong.’
He held her tightly, he couldn’t let her go again. He pointed at the figure still peering at the gravestone. Fading now, she was a mere grey smudge upon the stone, a shadow or pall that seemed to collapse into the gathering darkness.
‘She might,’ he nodded as if only talking to himself, ‘I mean she might remember us before she too turns upon this way again.’
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The podcast currently has 506 episodes available.