Sun worshippers

Poem for the week, 9 January 2023

 

 

 

 

Sun worshippers
Milan, Italy

Shelterless
above the nativity of St Mary,

like sunflowers
we orient our adoration,
in echo of the Magi,
towards the closest star;

high solar clergy
genuflecting
factor 30 on bare skin,
below an azure altar.

Divesting denim vestments,
we inverse-prostrate
ourselves below
the Madonnina,

facing the heavens,
backs to the buttresses.

Metropolitan soundscapes
rise as prayerful murmurs,
muffled by time,
dimmed by height,

intruding soft as incense
on our supra-cathedra sanctum,
where one has rolled her skirt
up to her groin

and one tucked wicking wool
inside her intimate silk
in timeless vogue
for worshipping the sun,

less fashionable for vespers
in the nave below.

from Those Footsteps Behind (buy here)
more at brucemarsland.com

A visitation

Poem for the week, 27 November 2022

A visitation
Talgarth, Powys, Wales, United Kingdom

In a house near a hamlet near a village near here,
the White Lady walks, they say.

Even amid the braggadocio of drunk tongues,
voices hush for the tale in reverence,
in melancholy, in deference.

There is talk of a fire in a cellar
and a deliberately locked door.

There is talk of a miscreant cursed
with the head of a giant bull.

Stories hop across my synapses
as I lodge in the shadows of Lord Hereford’s Knob.

My imagination shifts the spirit
from lady to daughter to serving girl,
until a library clock lullaby of a dozen tiny bells.

In the noiseless night, the house inhales
the hamlet’s restless air.

Without waking or dreaming, I find attention upon me,
held in the power of an impartial curiosity.
Without seeing or hearing, I observe the observer,
bathed in the pale aura of a subconscious whisper.
Without moving, without feeling,
I am returned to my sleep, not permitted my senses.

Night drifts on.

After days after hours locals chat in the pubs,
pausing at cook’s clatter and caterwaul.

In a house near a hamlet near a village near here,
the White Lady walks, they say.

from Those Footsteps Behind (buy here)

The sniffer

Poems in the time of Corona

An extract from Those Footsteps Behind: Around the World in 50 Poems

The sniffer 
An aircraft above Casablanca, Morocco

 
Support a poet. Buy a book.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems

Time travellers

Poems in the time of Corona

An extract from Those Footsteps Behind: Around the World in 50 Poems


Time travellers
Lyme Regis, Dorset, England

They did not come here to die. Who does?
These stony time-travellers
sunbaking along the shoreline.

Wrinkled features peering towards the waves,
they sit coiled side by side
as if trapped in a laboratory show-case.

Deck-chair ammonites, escaping
oil wells, gas fields, tar sands,
make this coast a permanent vacation.

They've been this way so long
they're too petrified to move: decades pass in familiar
scents and salts, the same view of the Cobb.

Grayscale glass plates and climate change histograms,
past and future,
old bones become ancient shells on the beach.



Support a poet. Buy a book.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging: lyrics of love and loss
Those Footsteps Behind: around the world in 50 poems

Chasing lions in our pyjamas

An illustrated reading of an extract from Those Footsteps Behind.

Imaging and footsteps

At first glance, the two volumes of poetry that I have recently self-published may not appear to be very closely connected.  They are, however, conceived as different sides of the same coin. To put it another way, Magnetic Resonance Imaging is the yin to the yang of Those Footsteps Behind.



Some of the material in Magnetic Resonance Imaging may be familiar to readers of this blog.  At a personal level, it represents "the Finland years" and was mostly written in the period 2005-2009.  The themes of pain and loss play a large role, whether physically or emotionally.  Moreover, the point of view is very much an inwardly directed gaze.  The intention is that this is enhanced by the use of the structure of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, as the music bounces around in the writer's mind.

On the other hand, the material in Those Footsteps Behind was, in chronological terms, written later. In this case, the writing represents the period 2012-2016. However, this is not necessarily synchronous with the time at which any events represented in the work took place.

The overarching themes now have become travel and time, and the point of view has become more outwardly focused. On the surface, the work is possibly more descriptive of physical landscapes than of emotional ones. The use of illustrative photographs, I hope, enhances this type of imagery. However, the poems in this case are intended to initiate at least some resonance in linking the concrete world of the traveller's footsteps to the intangible world of the traveller's experience.  Occasional echoes from other past and future travellers arise here and there to further muddy the mix.

The reader may choose to view the connections in different ways, of course: maybe not just inward-looking and outward-looking, but possibly pain and recovery, or shade and light.  Once beyond the writer's reach, words take on their own lives in a reader's hands, after all.  However, these two volumes will remain in the writer's mind as, if not twins, at least siblings.

"if they photographed my head they'd probably see her.
she's always there"
(Magnetic Resonance Imaging)

"life for us from this point on
means chasing lions in our pyjamas."
(Those Footsteps Behind)