Is this moon new or young, a sliver or a crescent, silver or golden in the deep blue, the newly deep sky, is it striking or dazzling or mesmerising?
Is this a late spring, belated and all the more welcome, bursting with life, with green, bright green, saturated with rain and sunshine, saturated with colour and heat, heat unfamiliar and all the more welcome, or is it sudden summer?
Is this life at last, is this joy, is this joy of life, is it zest, is it just new life-force or is it happiness or elation or bliss?
Reality, as it laps up against the shores of your eyes and your ears and your nose, reality as it washes over the leas of your skin and seeps beneath, cannot be captured in words, not even in verse: reality, so dense it feels like a dream, is not a dream cloud nor a word cloud.
Although this poem would make a good one, with the message of sudden summer sounding out like birdcall, flooded with light and colour, steeped in joy, as if words were written from life and for life, as if words were part of life, of the wide earth and the deep sky and the reality beyond, of the ever-flowing life-force.
Word cloud of the poem Sudden Summer (colours edited but randomly allocated).
Happiness Beyond (Word Cloud)
Your life is a green reality, it reads in large green letters, and newly young; the sky is golden at last, it states in fine golden letters, and saturated with joy; eyes and ears are bursting with wide bright light, it adds in silvery white; and at the edge there is happiness beyond colour on deep-blue ground.
These are welcome words, sudden and possibly deep, a mesmerising message from slivers of verse in your ears, from the new dream poem, from the word cloud of Sudden summer: Your life is a green reality saturated with joy under the newly young moon.
My life is not about me: It is about the mountains rising all around the horizon in the dense blue of dreams. It is about the mud I am made of, the little trees which I must water, the tall trees which give me breath. It is about the rivers around me, running, running without rest and singing without doubt.
My face is priceless: My face is mine alone, and an echo of my ancestors’ faces, a signal of my descendants’ faces. My face is a sacred lake, a blurred mirror of the sky, of the mountains and trees. I am drinking the sun, I am walking my way, I am singing my song.
Inspired by Navajo and other Native American philosophy.
Navajo pottery. Photograph: Woody Hibbard, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Three word clouds of this poem: one typed up on a Word document with all repetitions, two designed on the Simple Word Cloud Generator (left) and WordItOut (right), with the frequency of the words represented by their size and position. (You can click on the images to enlarge them.)
Via WordItOut, you can order badges or key-rings with the right-hand word cloud.
Aus Scheiterhaufen, ungeheuer, glimmt an den Säumen lautlos Feuer: Die finstern Wolken sind durchlichtet, als Sonnwendfeuer aufgeschichtet! Ein Rosenhag, verhundertfacht an Anmut und an Farbenpracht… Und dann erstrahlt am Horizont ein feingeschliffner neuer Mond.
The forest on fire, filling the screen, catches your eye, the living torches of the towering pines, the sore soles of the koalas, the bent skeletons of the verandas. You notice at last the whale on your doorstep, led astray, stranded, gasping, or the regal white bird, its wide wings spread out on your beach, already choked on your civilisation. Where is the lark? Half your precious planet is about to be razed. Face it.
When you rush out now to fight the fire, the flood, and the festering waste, do you not know it is too late for you, yourself? The biting fumes are invisibly running in the rivers of your blood, the glittering garbage is secretly heaped in the caves of your bones, the drugs and counter-drugs skip around in your brain. Doomed you confess to be? You are due, overdue. Half your precious life has already been cancelled. It’s gone.
Wie Kalksteinhügel liegen deine Wangen und deine Haare wie ein Pinienwald. Schon zittert meine Seele vor Verlangen nach deiner bloß erratenen Gestalt.
Ein dunkler Doppelsee sind deine Augen, noch beinah unberührt und unergründlich. Ob sie auch meine Zukunft in sich bergen, ist beinah ungedacht und unerfindlich.
Und wie das warme Meer rollt deine Stimme, wenn sich orangerot der Tagstern neigt… O schautest du nur auf und hieltest inne – und würdest niemals bloß Vergangenheit!
Description of a new acquaintance in terms of a Mediterranean landscape.
The title plays on the double meaning of the German word “presence” / “present”: the speaker is mesmerised by the other person and already has a faint hope that he or she will become the future… and never slide back into the past.
Zierliche Zweige, schwarz gegen den Honighimmel, Pfirsichhimmel, Flammenhimmel, die einzelnen winzigen Blätter klare Keilschriftzeichen auf irdenen Tafeln, leicht in der Hand und schwer von Geheimnis.
Der Himmel reißt auf, gezacktes Gewölk steigt, spreizt sich, schwenkt Geärm, rosa Riesenkoralle vor blaßblauer Südsee, zuckt auf, fällt zusammen, zieht fort, violett verwelkt, aschene Spur im Äther. Welch verschwenderischer Glanz…
Afar, I’ve seen the keen and tranquil green
of crater lakes, like mirrors of my dream…
And now I turn to look into your eyes
and find the same mysterious silver gleam
and realise my dream’s materialised.
Love happens, blossoms, thrives – and never dies.
Christina Egan 