They laid me in the earth, too deep to feel the sun's
warmth, or the tickling roots of grass.
For three nights I lay silent, open-eyed,
breathless. Seeing nothing in the blackness, a strange
entrancement, unmoving and disabled
and utterly absorbed into the night. On the third
night, hunger, raw and red, thrust my arms
Up to the sky, swimming through earth, erupting
into blinding white and silver. Soil
Fell from my face, my eyes, my mouth.
There was someone nearby.
I smelt & felt & heard & tasted & touched the
mind and the body warmth and all the secret fluids
That give life - then turned and saw,
in one living thing, ambulatory larder, cocktail
shaker in human form,
Warm red barbecue on 2 legs.
And I fed.......
Aaah, a tasty world!
And so much of it.
So many of them...
© Joules Taylor, 1995
(Pages from a notebook)
'...this little o...'
Inside the Cove was a stillness
and the silence of grass growing,
and standing between those two specific stones
there was safety. On the edge
were tourists, ear-pressed to rock,
listening.
Did they hear anything?
Echoes of voices down the millennia?
Whispers of ancient songs?
A chorus of grey guardians
ignored our progress along the Avenue. We reached
a hill filled with holes.
Within the Sanctuary a young man performed Tai Chi
for his quietly watching friends, and somehow it was
fitting - a link between the ages compassing
the world.
Relief on West Kennet long barrow.
Within, time-honoured stones and blackness,
running water, cold dryness, mud and old decay.
Without...An arch of cloudless blueness and a
drowsing sun slanting long shadows across
the land,
Our world encompassed in a tiny span
from horizon to horizon -
A distant obelisk's admonishing finger, a top-sliced
cone, a dance of stones,
Stars above veiled by brightness,
Earth below, her bones still bearing flesh
in rippling green waves.
On Pan's Bridge we found an owl.
A hundred amber eyes gazed from its whiteness
in puzzlement that man-made death had snatched the air
from under the clouds of its wings.
A phantom shape, its feathers too soft, too ghostly,
for human hands to feel.
Only the claws were real, curved for killing.
We took two feathers, weightless in our hands,
stood in silence a moment to commend Brighid's bird to
Cernunnos' keeping,
and moved speechlessly onward to rejoin the dance
through last autumn's rusted leaves.
© 1989 Joules Taylor
© 1999 WordWrights.