Poems from dry lands

Below are two poems I wrote recently that I was never going to publish, that come from the dry lands of my recent mind. In the chaotic shifts and transitions of life, in the high-energy-outward rush of mid-summer, I’ve been in the troughs of uninspired, sucked dry of any creative impulse, my mind too busy with the outer. In this desolate landscape of my inner life, I came across a beautiful line from a Federico Garcia-Lorca poem, words which stirred something in me and I remembered that the fire needs spaces, but more importantly it needs tending to. Releasing these two dry poems is just that, a slow tending to the creative fire, an honouring of the cycles of life and a prayer to find again the burn that keeps me awake.

“I’ve often lost myself,

in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake”

1. 14 June – home in far away places
   
   You have to sit in the dark
   and brew into your aloneness
   until loss is the only language you speak
   until grief is the only song you’ve ever known.
   
   To know the dark
   to tend to it until your bones
   crack with yearning.
   
   You’ve been on the periphery of life
   right at the edges of joy
   of beauty
   on the threshold of love
   not quite
   not yet
   almost always.
   
   Stay here
   until darkness knows you well enough
   and your soul learns the echoes
   of its own margins.
   
   Stay here until you’ve become
   a dissolution
   cooked by the fire of your yearning.
   Only then, may home find you
   in the moist boggy womb of a moor
   and at the end of hope
   may you be found by love.
   
   
   
2. 20 August – untitled
   
   the world is a rock in the pit of my stomach
   it sings its grief to me daily
   a choir of the lost, the orphans and the broken 
   
   some days I choose to be blind and deaf 
   marry myself to the mundane
   courtship to the unremarkable 
   
   some days, I remember myself as cell and soul 
   a body of light and wavering 
   
   and where there is the rock 
   there is a fire also that burns the delusions,
   inconsistencies to ash, no mirage in my being;
   my body the hearth and out of ashes 
   finding again
   the bones remembering themselves into life.
   
   some days 
   I am between.
   anchored to the threshold 
   wearing skins of contradiction
   
   I am heavy from this world
   which no longer falls in love
   with ears full of itself and empty
   with the mothers distracted, the weak men
   and their perversions;
   
   I come to the river that holds me
   to feed the only mouth that knows my name.