Called from the warm mists hanging like birdsong, forest deep
Dripping green into pools all bejewelled, frogs lick, eyes blink.
The barb of a bright silver fish, a spider’s deadly intent.
I am out-flowing
Blood pulsing moon
As are all waters
As are all women.
Slow swirling round mangrove roots
Ripples in the surface
Reflections
The sand ripples,
White sand from aeons of tiny shell fragments fallen
Breath after fragrant breath of breeze.
Diverted,
Put his papers on the sand,
Let himself be drawn with her hand around one of his fingers
To examine her important discovery.
Some somewhere
“Here,
Somewhere near,”
Until he understood
He was the find (and she was his find)
And wanted him, not his book
And wanted his understanding of where to look.
He showed her games of skim and splash with stones
They dammed the little stream as it strove out of the mangroves.
You could say I have been here often.
To watch a boy turn to a man.
To see how much of a boy is man
And of how much man is boy.
To see the way a girl’s beauty grows with her feeling,
The way the weather freshens up the gardens,
The way long rains favour the grasses and the vines,
The way the sun ripens the fruits and berries.
Yes you could say long
To see from lines drawn and arcs,
Men arriving to dig deep into the rock of old temples,
Masons of stone, builders of wood and rope,
Guilds of men to haul stone and tend makers to house them,
Those to wash clothes and cook food and the market to buy the food
And taxes and sheriffs.
To see growing tall away from all this,
A stone prayer carved with devotion,
Vaults raised in reverence,
Towers pushed up by men
On shaking wooden ladders,
Sickeningly high
Clouds lurch by,
Ropes and great stone weights,
And good reason for terror.
Count the bones buried near the east wall.
Men made brave
By the more grave terror of an unappeased god.
This was their uttermost
The temple echoed with song for so long,
Generations of loving veneration.
So that even now,
As you hear me sighing,
As the sea’s gull glides through empty windows
Around fallen walls holding a vaulted sky.
Even in the utter silence at the heart of the great stones,
at the contemplation of aeons
and in the utter moment,
Even now there is a kind of singing.
One is glad of it here,
Especially here.
I have no choosing.
My foaming caresses between the rock’s cleft,
My fuming and spouting with the fish,
My embracing of the boats,
My surging to the wind and the moon,
Is their play with me.
When you dance you join my song in the deep booming waves.
When you carve you join my slow carving of the cliffs.
I have left the boats lop-mired in the harbour,
Mussels clammed up against the sun’s fire,
Rotting pools, crabs hidden
And mut flats and worms.
You are out-flowing,
Your fires and incantations have raised a black storm,
March instead of dance,
Boom instead of sing,
Blood from your carving of each other.
You are a plague on living things
But those that plagued you.
The whale’s songs are almost silenced,
The forest is falling into the desert.
Your children are eaten alive.
You have blood in your mouth.
Corpses coke the fire’s fury.
I am called to speak.
Will you hear me
Over the noise of dying ?
There will be a turning;
While you can see still,
A sea where whales journey through coral gardens
Under fish-silver clouds, grazing the plains of plankton;
While insects still crawl through the bark of trees,
Birds fly in the branches, lovers rest in the shade;
While you can feel those who are part of the song and so sing.
You have already accomplished so much
Forgive yourself the time to listen more.
Did you read this in a minute’s haste
or in a quiet corner of the afternoon ?
You have too little time you say.
Yes, you have too little time.
Death rushing towards you
And you towards it.
Stop to contemplate
Or be too late,
Belated.
Wait.
Your children will still grow strong.
Talk and play long with them.
Your still garden’s beauty will grow.
Tend it in its tender truth.
You will work with one another
And learn to see your selves in each still other.
I am returning.
Filling up hollows, flooding the isthmus,
Slaking creatures marooned in rock pools,
Refloating the boats.
As the waiting bay is filled,
Your empty days will be fulfilled
In time.
You will see the answers that you seek.
While I turn again and again turn
You will turn your nature to a different time.
