persevering: happenstance

One thing it is so easy to forget in persevering is the existence of happenstance.

Because it takes consistent diligent effort, it is so easy to slip into the mindset that it is only one’s consistent diligent effort that exists.

A kind of siege mentality develops from such a state, making perseverance a kind of ironman-like endurance race, a continual suffering, a loneliness.

Indeed I have been making consistent diligent efforts to develop a studio rhythm such that without a ‘studio outside’ I can still access the studio inside.

But one of the most beautiful aspects of perseverance is that somethings, perhaps often, it meets with the happenstances that no personal efforts can conjure.

Like today, when the very first day of my summer rest, I find that the roadworks outside my home, the metal-on-rock cacophony of which has oppressed every week day for months from 7am in the morning, and from which I have been endlessly escaping to work at the local (also hectic) café, have been completed, dismantled and entirely disappeared. And my home, rather than being uninhabitable, has become a sanctuary.

bloom

Did a bud unfurl
in the garden?

Silence, birdsong,
intermittent conversation
overheard, on phone,
passing by

What was it that
held us
steady against the wind?

Branches trembling
Grasses shimmer
a frisson of petals,
scent

You held peace for us
eyes closed, a prayer?
mine roamed everywhere,
wondering
stealing a peek
at you who had
quite astonishingly
arrived.

Who are you to me?
Who will you be?
What were we doing there?
A beginning, a wish
full or frail?

Is a bud unfurling?
I cannot trust my senses,
hope.

descent

I find myself
long ago,
remains of memory
scraps

What were you to me?
I ask him,
whom I never saw again.

And you, who meant so much to me
at the time
what were you? a vanishing?

I pick my way between the
haunting presences,
strangely comfortable and familiar
they don’t answer
neither did they

passive
controlling
hiding in their baggage
I poke at them a final time
what have you to say for yourself?
you?

silence, their ancient
language, patrolling my
invisibility, eliminating me
slowly
colluding,
familiarity chokes me

Who did this to you?
they don’t reply
I forgive them.

spring, dry ground

a time has passed, days
we are long acquainted, and yet
separate

desolate, oh desert,
dry of tears and dust of weeping
endless plains
pains

heat of long despair
nothingness of prayer

colonising silence
I struggle to give voice
to my love’s song

deep and full within me
bubbling, turbulent
sweetness, warm and cool
a rain stored centuries
for you, hope

a stirring,
yet prisoned

break through,
ancient hope of truth,
beauty and delight,
break through

silence, hard and fierce
refusal,
my love’s song,
discouraged
deepens

a stirring
yet prisoned

distillation of sweet days
flowers, birds and beauty
resdolent with meaning,
moments bathed in wonder
atoms dancing, molecules
in song,
renewal’s promise
eternal
a sea, a stream, a storm
a purity of force

suddenly a rushing
unbidden, a fierceness,
filtering a crack, sudden, sudden

silence

a spring
ancient spring
I effervesce my wealth
raucous with abandon
liquid laughter
embraces stale silence
to life
baptises austerity
bathes pains
flows, flows, flows

Note: this poem is a work in progress and, interestingly to me, encapsulates in its in-progress state the very tensions intended to be present in the image of the poem that came to me this morning. I hope to come back to this image and poem at point with greater completeness. But for now the very representations of my own inner state of fullness and frustration evident in the not-quite-working feeling (at least to me) of the poem are wryly comforting.

hush

Hush, a calm descends
Twilight blossoms its stillness
into night

I heard you breathing
Or did I dream
I heard you, sure
I heard you

pooled serenities
stars, songs, sea, storm
still a stillness
sovereignty

shh suspension
whisper not
a movement
lulls me, lulls

Peace amidst a glimmer
is it night?
it shines
certainty

Hush into this
vast birthfulness
cradled child
we are a oneness

Note: this is the last (I think) poem written from the Divenire series, painted to the backdrop of a performance (to myself!) of Einaudi’s work. The work for this poem is created in the same colours as before, but resulting in a work of profound peace, although there is a sense that in the depths, something new is already stirring.