To summon lost words

If elves are absent from your life
and glee is blanketed by algae,
drowned in swamps of yesterday;

if elves are absent, if you need
their sprightly mischief like you need
the air, the brush of friendly lips;

if elves are absent, don’t despair.
Sing loud of dragonflies and dippers,
waterfalls and lily pads.

If elves are absent, splash your face
with pearls of fresh spring water: words
new-minted; green perspectives. Trick
your mood from silence into sound.

Kathy Gee

with no hope of finality

…poetry is a strategy of making audible meanings without disturbing the silence, an art of homing in tentatively on vital scarcely perceptible signals, making no mistakes, but with no hope of finality, continuing to explore.

Ted Hughes
Introduction to Selected Poems by Vasko Popa

shared experience of catastrophe

I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.

Rebecca Solnit
The impossible has already happened: what coronavirus can teach us about hope
The Guardian 7th April 2020

connected by a spiritual bond

As a child, I listened to these fairy tales with flushed cheeks and tears in my eyes, because I believed deeply that objects have their own problems and emotions, as well as a sort of social life, entirely comparable to our human one. The plates in the dresser could talk to each other, and the spoons, knives and forks in the drawer formed a sort of a family. Similarly, animals were mysterious, wise, self-aware creatures with whom we had always been connected by a spiritual bond and a deep-seated similarity. But rivers, forests and roads had their existence too ― they were living beings that mapped our space and built a sense of belonging, an enigmatic Raumgeist. The landscape surrounding us was alive too, and so were the Sun and the Moon, and all the celestial bodies―the entire visible and invisible world.

When did I start to have doubts? I’m trying to find the moment in my life when at the flick of a switch everything became different, less nuanced, simpler. The world’s whisper fell silent, to be replaced by the din of the city, the murmur of computers, the thunder of airplanes flying past overhead, and the exhausting white noise of oceans of information.

At some point in our lives we start to see the world in pieces, everything separately, in little bits that are galaxies apart from one another, and the reality in which we live keeps affirming it: doctors treat us by specialty, taxes have no connection with snow-plowing the road we drive to work along, our lunch has nothing to do with an enormous stock farm, or my new top with a shabby factory somewhere in Asia. Everything is separate from everything else, everything lives apart, without any connection. […]

The world is dying, and we are failing to notice. We fail to see that the world is becoming a collection of things and incidents, a lifeless expanse in which we move around lost and lonely, tossed here and there by somebody else’s decisions, constrained by an incomprehensible fate, a sense of being the plaything of the major forces of history or chance. Our spirituality is either vanishing or becoming superficial and ritualistic. Or else we are just becoming the followers of simple forces―physical, social, and economic ― that move us around as if we were zombies. And in such a world we really are zombies.

Olga Tokarczuk
The Tender Narrator [ Nobel Lecture on 7th December 2019]
Trans. Jennifer Croft and Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Altar

I have always had some sort of an altar in every residence I’ve ever lived in, whether that be my childhood room, apartment, dorm room, or house. I consider my altar work to be an outward representation of my inward spiritual work. It’s a place to consolidate power, and a home for the gods and spirits I work with. […] Even before there were established religions, people from all continents have, for thousands of years been constructing shrines, cairns and altars in caves, forests, fields and in their homes, turning mundane and ordinary places into those that were both mystical and sacred. This is true in my own home.

Emily
Altar Work

populated by weird and wonderful beings

The general term of the Otherworld actually covers many different realms. In modern terms, you might see it as similar to the ‘astral plane’ – where each thing has a counterpart, and to manoeuvre or effect change there can cause corresponding changes here. It is also a place in its own right, populated by weird and wonderful beings, which one can meet and greet and even fight in certain states of walking between the worlds. There are other realms that form a part of An Saol Eile, such as the more traditional realm of the Underworld, or land of the dead, ruled by Donn, lord of death. There are many different places and landscapes contained in the one idea of the Otherworld, places sometimes seen in myths, such as in ‘The Voyage of Bran’, as islands to be visited. They are accessed variously: over the sea as islands, or through a Sidhe, which originally may have meant an ‘abode’ but came to mean the magical passage graves, tumuli, ring forts, or any of the other surviving ancient earthworks or monuments or mounds. It could also be accessed through pools or lakes, under which the Otherworld entrances were said to be; natural caves or mountaintops; or through the magical mists that descended and caused folks to become disoriented or lost. We see lands such as Eamhain Abhlach, the ‘sacred place of apples’; Tir inna mBeo, or the ‘Land of the Living’, where none know sickness or ill health and all have an innocence that leaves the pleasure of love and passion unsullied by any form of guilt; Magh Meall, which means something like ‘plain of joy’, where the ladies are numerous and always pleasing to the eye and the soul, apparently – a land filled with wonderful music from birds and instruments unseen, inexhaustible vessels of plenty to rival the Dagda’s own cauldron, and much food and drink of delightful variety and taste; and of course the wonderful Tir na nÓg, ‘Land of the Young’, to which Fionn Mac Cumhaill’s son Oisín was led by Niamh of the Golden Hair.

Lora O’Brien
Irish Witchcraft

I want to be touched

A hand on my thigh. That is what I’m thinking about, most of the time. A hand slipping under my dress, the other holding the steering wheel, and me, upright in the passenger’s seat. Fearless. Always fearless in love, like I’ve had practice. Look, I know you’re sick of hearing about the skin of it all, but I’m not done being shameless with where I want to be touched. A hand pressed lightly against my neck. Lips grazing the apple of my bottom lip. Your name like a tongue over the ridges of my teeth. Your body like a downpour with me dancing underneath it.

Caitlyn Siehl
Most of the Time

Lola

I met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry-cola
C O L A cola
She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Lola
L O L A Lola la-la-la-la Lola

Well I’m not the world’s most physical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine
Oh my Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Well I’m not dumb but I can’t understand
Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man
Oh my Lola la-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola

Well we drank champagne and danced all night
Under electric candlelight
She picked me up and sat me on her knee
And said little boy won’t you come home with me
Well I’m not the world’s most passionate guy
But when I looked in her eyes well I almost fell for my Lola
La-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Lola la-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola
I pushed her away
I walked to the door
I fell to the floor
I got down on my knees
Then I looked at her and she at me

Well that’s the way that I want it to stay
And I always want it to be that way for my Lola
La-la-la-la Lola
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for Lola
La-la-la-la Lola

Well I left home just a week before
And I’d never ever kissed a woman before
But Lola smiled and took me by the hand
And said dear boy I’m gonna make you a man

Well I’m not the world’s most masculine man
But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man
And so is Lola
La-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola
Lola la-la-la-la Lola la-la-la-la Lola

Raymond Douglas Davies

The sybil of the cwm

staring eyes soon be pecked out
ants tramp over rabbit head
trawl for morsels

stew was tasty
hot and hearty
keep me going long days

always put dead thing out there
rabbit head good decoy
sometimes neck-broken bird
or squirrel fish carcass

keep nosy dogs out
cave mine no-one else
here before made memory
many summers not know count
or winters

only travel out in dark hours
forage in shadows
for collect water wild garlic in spring
horse parsley chervil

in summer sorrel dandelion and nettle
when shorter days come
berries nuts mushrooms roots

some nights in owl time
follow foxy mud path
to beach for catch fish or crab
and swim

winter safer
visitors come warmer days
dogs children people
must spend long time in there

move smaller rocks
make false wall
crawl in back tunnel

wait where bats roost
sleep sound in dream-story
in warm
smell of earth

and sometimes
in daytime creep out
view people
some look here
stare at place where hide

high up I see all steep valley
watch below
through ivy hanging trees

not see me

Jackie Biggs

simple pressure of the hand

Seeing that a simple pressure of the hand
Can make the symbol of my senses stand,
What if I saw your body, where unite
The lure of water and the gold of light.

Henry M. Christman
Gay Tales and Verses from the Arabian Nights