Green Gold Light and Machine Metaphors
A couple of poems from my upcoming book Vespers.
This newsletter is called ‘Talismans Against Boring Culture’, but what’s a talisman?
It’s a protective charm or amulet, usually physical, but in this case made of language, ideas, images, emotion.
Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing a few poems from Vespers, which will be available at the end of the month in paperback, ebook and, if there’s enough hours in the day, audiobook.
All profits from the first year going to Arts Emergency which helps young people, often from underrepresented backgrounds, get a break in the arts and humanities - a sort of cultural immune response to the erosion of imagination and aesthetics.
So here are a couple of poems. Whisper them aloud in the office, I dare you.
Green Gold Light I’m a hunter for the green gold light that spills through leaves, plunges through rivers, draping itself in the eddies of boulders and the gliding shadows of clover, bursting out in veins of shimmering crystal and shoals of green-gold salmon, brushing their translucent bellies over the branches, leaves and cheeks of all the lifted faces swaying in their graces.
That one was inspired by a dream. Some dreams a gift, and I woke up from that one feeling irrationally good. Those who spend their lives studying dreams, such as Jung, Hillman, and Stephen Aizenstat, suggest that dreams are the language of the anima mundi - the soul of the world.
This might seem far out until we remember that human beings are part of the material life of the planet, co-evolved over millions of years with rivers, rocks, storms, and pestilence, egrets, electrons, and tigers.
Scholars in physics, ecology and neuroscience are now talking about our planet and the cosmos as a dance or a symphony. This perspective is quite different from the one we’ve inherited - that nature is machine. Humans, animals, and the entire cosmos used to be considered clockwork, but that’s been replaced by the metaphor of the computer. Here’s a poem in response to that.
Not a Machine You are not a flat tire. You are not a broken engine. You are not a servo whose battery needs replacing. You are not a computer whose software needs updating. If someone whispers in your ear everyday: ‘Did you know you’re a machine?’ you’re likely to believe it. But if you’re heart is a chambered pump then its full of kingfishers, hundreds of them, calling to the vast herds of oxen stampeding through your blood, and the boars in your belly sniffing about for chunks of starlight and bulbs of roasted gold. You are not a machine. You are a communion of creatures, a cavalcade of critters tossing around champagne, lashing magma coloured bunting across the balconies of your brain. Descendants of bacteria drunk on raven speech and heron call, throwing chemical poetry through your cells, like contraband cast over the Berlin wall; Premium Moonshine, Dionysian Red, fermented in the cellars of Kronos, spilling forth divine inspiration that moves the hand of Marie Curie and Mary S. Morgan, of Miles Davis and Charles Darwin, of Anne Conway and Da Vinci’s left. So break the seal on the WD40 and remember that it’s time to get naughty with the hundred thousand mysteries twisting and listing on the shining, gleaming, golden edge of your darkly shadowed vision.
More coming next Monday. Have an excellent week.