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.
die ungeahnten sonnenglanz vergießen die regenschauer und den regenbogen zu einem milden meeresgrau verwoben die augen sollen meine verse grüßen. dem nebelland das immerkalte wogen in ungestümem reigentanz umschließen den inseln voller sprühendgrüner wiesen sind jene augen ursprünglich enthoben. drum frag ich nicht nach lilien und lavendel die flammen sprühen auf gebeugtem stengel noch nach des südens uferlosem blau nichts brauche ich als meinen kleinen garten wo alle wunder lächelnd meiner warten die bunte welt geballt in sprühendgrau.
This sonnet is part of a cycle of 14 poems, whereby each line of the first one (rosengarten I. tiefversteckt) furnishes the first line of a new sonnet.
The island described here is Ireland, but the cycle takes you to other islands, as well as to the palace gardens of Würzburg, Germany, which first inspired me.
Word cloud of colours in the German sonnet cycle (rosengarten I-XIV), generated on theSimple Word Cloud Generator. In the middle are “colourful”, “green”, and “golden”. Since the colours of the roses are not described, the roses themselves are added.
Ach, wozu noch Meeresblau je beschwören und wozu Wellenschlag und Morgentau, wenn ein Paar bestickter Schuh bunt aus Schutt und Asche schaut, – angefaucht und fortgefegt – und die namenlose Braut nie mehr ihre Füße hebt, nie ein Kind zum Himmel hält… Ach, wie bleibt das Meer bloß blau? Denn es stirbt die ganze Welt, frißt der Drache eine Frau. Fällt die Kugel einen Mann, klagt ein ganzes Engelheer. Lautlos schreit ein Schlüsselbund aus dem Schrott,– doch hört ihn wer? Paßt der Schlüssel auch ins Schloß, hängt die Tür in schräger Wand, denn ein treffliches Geschoß riß das Haus halb in den Sand. Immer wieder gibt es Krieg voller Lügen, voller Lärm. Niemals aber gibt es Sieg, nur die Hoffnung wie ein Stern.
In this poem, War is personalised as a hissing dragon burning, devouring, or blasting away everything in its way.
The title is a pun on an old word for “excellent”, literally “hitting precisely”: in a war, success is based on destruction.
On October 7th, 2023, the Palestinian terror organisation Hamas committed a massacre and mass abduction in Israel, whereupon the Israeli Government launched a war on the Palestinian territory of Gaza. It has since attacked the West Bank and invaded neighbouring country Lebanon, where the terror organisation Hezbollah de facto rules. The aim on both sides is evidently genocide. This is destruction against destruction, revenge upon revenge, genocide versus genocide.
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.
Some of us are pushing the swings in the park, a powerful pendulum, some are hurrying for their daily bread, counting the pennies in their pockets, and all are treading on rustling leaves, fallen too soon, too soon this year, for the world is brittle with heat and creaking and breaking apart.
The rain has come and gone but the clouds have stayed: No rainbow today over the weathered church. The blue emerges, the brightness of grass, of the thousand things, and the old oak stands smiling. Higher the swings go and higher –
Then the sky bursts with the lion’s roar of the helicopter, closer, close, here, the colour of blood. And we look at each other and fear the worst and know it has happened again.
A street between brick walls, a random courtyard or a random corner has been stained, and from the earth cries someone’s blood, someone’s brother’s blood, our brother’s blood.
I have seen the red helicopter of the emergency services land in parks in Tottenham (Lordship Recreation Ground and Bruce Castle Park). In both cases it was the middle of the day, and in both cases, a teenager had been stabbed, once fatally and once nearly so. Another young man was shot and left to die in Tottenham Cemetery. All these green spaces are vast and idyllic.
Christina Egan 