Ba Laigh O

Boy, roll the dark and roll the stars

Inna a drum to sound out far

Bring ’em pouring white and charred

Them painted bodies under the stars

–

Ba laigh o you bend the beats

An’ break the floor down underneath

As I watch the flashin’ of your feet

Ba laigh o down underneath

–

Boy, jump the sea an’ raise your gun

Thunder voice to drum and drum

Throw bass bullets on your run

An’ inna yell the sea be stunned

Parallel Outlet: 7

“The low divides we dare not cross,

all that we’ve loved, all that we’ve lost…”

So begins the poem Divides by Eric M. Vogt, a piece that I return to read now and then. In short and seamless lines any manner of things loved and lost are conjured up for the reader, and although it is Valentine’s Day, loss has long been a poetic side to love.

There are surely as many beautiful poems of loss as there are of love, and the stories that compel us almost never contain love alone. Those stories contain uncertainty, regret, transience, and the irrevocable loss itself, where sadness serves as a tribute and brings us to question endings.

What is an ending? Fatigue, alienation, death?

“Love is a many splendoured thing”, and the ending of loves throughout history has been a great mover of men, cities, and countries. Divides brought all this and more to mind. And it ends with a tantalizing reference to memory, the only place where things that have ended may survive.

The Girl in Summer

Stayed by your call from up the lane

I linger beneath the play of boughs

Until, breathless, my side you gain

All bright disdain for a warm brow

–

In your laugh you call up the breezes

And in your tread, seeds of content

Thus unconscious your spirit teases

My own staid and steady bent

–

Returning

Look for him when the cicadas fade

When the seedpods come unbound

When with every breath and every rain

The fan-shaped leaves fall down

© 2012 Elizabeth Cook

The Sylvan Historian

There are not the sounds within the forest that there used to be.

Though the Historian can conjure up all that was – the poplar children, shy yet bold, the ageing men within the oaks, the rowan women who pretended indifference – this is but one symptom of a mind mired in the past.

And what the Historian conjures, like the lightest of veils, drifts away whenever the wind sweeps past without the slightest mutter of leaves or the scurrying of small things.

Daily Prompt: Childhood Revisited

I wish that in my childhood I had not lost my best friend – in such a way that the blame is to be laid upon both of us.

The first time I saw someone make a post in the form of a letter I felt compelled to write the following letter for my own benefit, since there would be no point in sending it.

To send it, now, would be strange.

Will-o’-the-wisp

With the tail end of twilight, descent by chance

Down into my valley, I notice your steps

You a traveler footsore with your hem in the dust

 Seeking safe rest, in grass dry or lush

–

At the base of the slope, under the apple tree

You lay down your pack and drop to your knees

And from within my marsh I dart and I drift

In watching you, stranger, with keen interest

The first to pass through in a seeming age

A bell on your belt, and your cloak an array

Of patches and colours that speak of far places

Of roads well-worn and of roads that wait

Daily Prompt: Right to Health

Should the government or the private sector provide access to healthcare?

I would prefer a mixed system, and this is why:

The question could apply to the provision of health insurance and/or to health services. Let us first assume health insurance.

Without going into the math, there is a line of reasoning as to why unregulated private health insurance would not cover an entire population.

Parallel Outlet: 6

“…at last the band attained bright summit
looked past the clouds across the land
lives braided beaded into a unit
this strange and varied merry band”

The thought came immediately – I want to see this poem as a movie.

Sonnet in my Bonnet, by Brad at beyond the event horizon, tells of a band coming together. Perhaps because of the language I was transported back to the days of lyres and pipes and harps, and I arrived at a time and setting like the Lord of the Rings. Where like some medieval tale the improbable characters would meet, in a land that was still more natural than human.

Man in a Coffin

Tell me of your underworld

When you take me to Zanzibar

Speak truisms to a shadow

As I slip into the water

–

I’ll form a fleet with strangers

Taking colours in their race

Delivery by tropic mafia

Children at a child’s pace