Tags
2022, 20th century, 8*, afternoon, banshee, blood, blue, brown, capitalism, Carol, childhood, dream, eyes, faces, fields, garden, gold, growing, history, landscape, life, maelstrom, measure, mist, object, objectification, orange, plane, production, sapphire, sky, sound, space, storm, summer, sweet, time, whorl, World War I
the inevitable tock
this queasy land
life out of time, this dreamscape
with waist-high mist
and then a uni-prop dhrined straight across the sky one endless summer gardenoon
made a whorl
brown and bloody fields
and jar-sweet marmalade
wherein history appeared
as proliferated objects
space now only a measure
the face appears
in the eye of the storm
tarnished blue and palsy
measuring gossamer gold
between always-contestable markers
from an impossible sapphire cap
only retrospectively glimpsed now
as screaming banshees
back in the maelstrom
when we close our eyes
————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–
20th century wormhole: the reach turned to loveafternoon & Carol & garden & sky & time wormhole: time
blue & gold & life wormhole: Journey
brown & capitalism wormhole: travel // when I die
childhood wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – An Old Piano
dream wormhole: Candaka
eyes wormhole: Four Noble Truths
faces wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – valley
fields wormhole: ‘and is there homage …’
history wormhole: the simple prayer // the tattered poem // the bitter lament
mist wormhole: taking birth
orange wormhole: nowhere / that can be seen
sound wormhole: long / road
space wormhole: under the blue and blue sky
storm wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Sky
summer wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Rain
mlewisredford 
Ekphrastic poetry, indeed! Interesting how on first read, I came up empty. And then I saw the art (which is fabulous), and read through again. The mist parted like the Red Sea. Well done, Moses.
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thank you; I passed on your comment to Carol and she was thrilled
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Nightmare and dreamscape. Cosmic and earthly. Forward gazing?…looking? and rewinding.
It was really the title that grabbed me, and then everything else.
I don’t know much to say about this one. I like the art but I prefer the poem. “palsy” is a great word, and I once knew a young man who had a kind of facial paralysis and who suffered from conditions I then associated with the elderly.
The land being “queasy” and “waist-high mist” is where I see you looking upward at some conundrum in the sky. No easy answer, and death looming is how I read it.
“history appeared/as proliferated objects/space now only a measure”. Well, that’s how I see and feel things most of the time. What the hell is history? What the hell is general relativity in light of history? Oh no, I’m rambling and my shallow is showing.
The ending, the screaming banshees and the maelstrom. Dream gone wild? An Irish spirit who entered the storm and warns of our and your and their and all coming death? But there is rebirth?
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there were indeed many daubs and scrapes which only made sense when they whorled into catastrophe: reading ‘in’ from the edge, the uneasy squeeze (through the hourglass) between Britain’s Empire past and the coming inter-muscling of Europe (which certainly produced a lot of death) … and my early childhood, not even yet aware of the conventions that I never would be able to master; the ‘cutting’ line wove those two dabs together – the development and inevitable exploitation of flight and the memory of my (by then absent) Dad who used to identify a uni-prop or twin prop, without looking up, as it flew overhead during a warm summer afternoon in the garden wherein I still didn’t really know what we were doing there, but it was peaceful; WWI happened, Dad left, things became bloody and too-solid and the force of production moved from steam-driven to market-need; now that we have worked that through our system, we have peaceful times, united under consumption (Putin struggling to keep up with the game), look it’s been clear as blue sky for the last 75 years (just that very slight and high queasy mist of struggles for independence, against the commies, the Middle East) while our histories, now, dressed in the finest woven gold as befits a naked Emperor, despair of progress or design (‘it’s religious, and we have developed far beyond that‘) while drilling down with blithely oblivious rational scrutiny; and I have been squeezed out of the other side of a mincer called career and still don’t know what I’m doing here
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