By an Intricate Set of Layers . . .

Perhaps we didn’t see the pacing of our lives

Was caught and structured by an intricate

Set of layers---

Thoughts hidden from the present

Held captive by the past

Jars of dark, line the inward shelves---

The strata of our dreams in the onward journey---

Layers of some fruitful substance of mind

Laid between the green lines of our spiralling ‘flowers’

Growing up--- one upon another---

And over and over

The delicate, many-petalled beauty of every

Crashing tragedy--- encased in cracked jars---

Pockets of crushed lilies---

Which could rise from their containers---

An untapped source of inspiration---

And mediate between the lines

And alter the course and speed

Of our crippling pace of progress

It is so --- and so it is --- and we are nearer each time

                                     *

- From:  ARKIAHH DREAMING; The Ragged Writings of Everland; Volume 3

V. 2. / 14.) Gone The Former Illusions From My Clouds

Gone the former illusions from my clouds

Now is the white massed cloud, that’s after rain

Standing out, round with mountains, valleys,

Great gaps and depths – low on the horizon –  

Celebrating the whole of it...

They don’t anymore veil my dreams from me

Those clouds which come to drown me

Those laden with unlovely things of hardship

Grey, heavy steps in drops of merging dark

Come to threaten me with their blanketing deluge

Seeming to confuse – and blind me from my purpose –     

They may come as they will...

They can do nothing to me that was not needed

For my joy and growth – I saw it!

From the confusion my dreams rose all the brighter

Washed, dried – left shining – to draw me onward

And into that new-strengthened dream

Which was my destiny...

                                           *

Writing Saga # 23 / The House of Amethyst Poetry; Part Six

Continued from Writing Saga # 22; The House and its Rooms and its Environs…

  The walled garden:   This was the lovely cultivated paradise I passed through on my walk along the white shell path leading to and from the house. On either side of my pathway was a free flowering in-world of living and growing delight! An oasis. A profusion of watered beauty tucked away from the dry deserts of out-world busyness. Here beds of heart’s-ease and forget-me-not kept me cradled in pools of simplicity and quietness, which are a garden’s gift. Tidy beds of dreamy cottage flowers…tiny infusions of my mind with dreamy distractions…these were the necessary solaced insights that visual loveliness will impart to lonely sojourners. Beautifully ordered in chaotic non-order my cultivated in-garden breathed peaceful diversion. Inner poetry. Fragrant lavender, subtle violas and violets diverting the word-gaze of my writing life onto lighter things, and away from the surface follies of the eminently necessary.

   The wilds:  Between my walled garden and the forest was the orchard; this was so rich a place that I must write it separately. Beyond the orchard was the wilds bounded on one side by the orchard wall and on another by the pine forest and on the remaining two sides by the running brook. Tumbling and tripping over itself, because the wilds sloped down to the river of which my running brook was but a tiny tributary.

   The wilds were wide and free and as uncertain of order as my garden was vivid with it. I loved this place! Thorny briar roses grew here in tangles of raw verbiage and crazy thought. Poetry gone mad. ‘Ragged writings’ gone feral. Blackberry and nettles, dock and thistles grew here in a riot of self, in lost fear-for-skin; and all in a profusion of rank wild grasses in a perpetual abandonment to glorious liberty. Dock and nettle. ‘Good and evil.’ I was free of all earthly interpretations. An antidote for every ill was in this wild place. If I picked any deadly thing it did not harm me.

  ‘It is better every thought should be uttered freely, fearlessly, than that any great thought should be denied utterance for fear of evil. It is only through complete independence that all goodness can be spoken, that all purity be found. …Restrictions hide vice and freedom alone bears morality.’*  I am not loved because I am ‘good;’ I am loved because I am Love’s little child.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        (* Robert Henri; The Art Spirit.)

These are the titles of the next two ‘ragged writings’ of amaranthine poetry:

Taken!

Intrinsic Desire

(Poetry/ Vol. 1. ) Sword of Unpuzzling Paradox

from THE RAGGED WRITINGS OF EVERLAND



Streams Cascading

Streams cascading, crevasses opening

Falling shafts of penetrating light

Seeping through these broad solid rocks 

Sounds of entering truth, double-edged

Sword submerged become part of stone

Part of pain embedded until drawn out

Lifts of sharper seams of purest thought

Piercing the veil the thickness of skin

Dimension of the broadest stone squared

Thinking they knew never fully finding

Though hundreds of years were given

To find of the quest the embedded answer

Stuff of inner dryness the paradox unseen

A verdant first part leaves the second dead

Clinging to one losing the next

So the semblance of a viridian river only

Deceitful rivers narrow for the splaying out

Past pages of unpuzzling paradox for the few

Narrowed given and with a quivering fullness

Clinging things must fall for the unattached

Loosened space there where we were emptied

Then the ease of pulling a sword from a stone

Then the drawing of refulgent lines from rock

Un-jostling phrases of life’s cryptic thought

Spilling out the jangles spread out space there

Peace passing from the crippling applause

Unpuzzling paradox an inner candle rekindles

Patience born of being blown out awhile

Then lit the heart’s treasured cup this sangreal

Only home and container of the broken soul

Homeward parts the enigma’s unravelling gift

Gutted

Diamond glinting tiny splinter 

Sharp piercing shaft of words

Slicing inward hitting harder

Ripping through my heart

                        *

How small the thing that hurts the most!

How harsh the truth that works in me the greater good!

No pea beneath twenty mattresses

Could have left me half so black and blue

As this tiny sword’s thrust through my little book:

The pearl, sparing nothing to spare me:

The truth, holding back nothing to hold me

                        *

Shallow the outer knowledge

That saw me gain some good

But which through lack of loss

Cluttered me within

Deep the inner knowledge

That saw me lose some good

But which through that gift of loss

Uncluttered me within

The diamond sword that sliced the stone:

The dividing line that told them both apart.

Two-edged plunged two sides were seen
And the difference there, between them,
The light that rent my heart in twain 
That set my life full free!

       
                        *

Writing Saga # 18 / The House of Amethyst Poetry, Part One

  

     My life was like a house.  Its different rooms held different aspects of writing. From attic to cellar, from the main rooms, two up and two down, and the lean-to back kitchen and woodshed there flowed different types of writing.

   But first, before anything of the house could be revealed or any writing in any room of it, exist there was the pathway to it. 

The path:  This was narrow and a little winding and white with crushed pipi shells. This white path was lined on either side by a low, dark-green box hedge. Beyond the little hedge and on either side was a cottage garden, full of flowering plants and fragrant herbs and some small shrubs. At the furtherest bounds of the garden was a sheltering curtain of tall trees, and beyond these a pine forest which roared when the wind blew from the southeast.

   My crushed but shining path led to the door of the house; and without this there was no other way to it; and without the door there was no entry.

   Much of my poetry to date has been the pathway.  In the sharing of my hard things, the crushing things which led to the house and its inner riches most often everything became highly metaphorical and encoded, but some of the 'ragged writings' were shallower and plain. All, though give only surface hints of the horror and pain that once was below in my journey through the forest, and along the white shell path to the House.  

These are the titles of the next four ‘ragged writings’ of Amethyst Poetry:

Altered

Gutted 

Where My Heart is

The Inner Arms

Searching All Things

A freer journey starts as the new day dawns

Everland opens further to early searchers

Its festive realms ever more profound

Its seeings, smaller, its treasures tinier by far

Responsive atoms join in flurries in stronger lines

Deeper mine shafts loom dark, the spirit searching all things

Out of utter undoing the seeker flies the deeper faster

Taking form in what is found, from what was given

 

A road appears, the steeply curving least-taken path

And on it, all the fallen dead splayed out in colours of fire

The trees beside them stand almost bare of splendour

Their dying season here all their old knowledge-leaves fall

A man-child walks as a woman encompasses a man             

And down the winding way they wander fused as one

Brighter still their hearts of flame they burn fuller red

But centre-pinned their passion passes by unseen

Blind the eyes that refuse entry by the narrow door 

A Ring of Love

He has taken me with a snare, a ring of love

And broken me when I fell stumbling

He has taken me with a fish trap

A tangled web of passion

And peeled me when I surrendered

He has opened me with sunlight, and filled every gap

He has seen me with moonlight, and tipped me out

He has chosen me with a circlet, a ring-knife of swiftlight

And cut me in twain, torn down all my walls

He has chosen me in the furnace of affliction

And set me amongst the fiery stars

Not any hurt can harm me, nor any terror shake me

With their silent speech with the circle of their sound

He has married me to the Songs of Wales

Made of ever-living roads, I am

Yet, before ever they were, the rising wells

With the lucent shore with the amaranthine rocks

He has married me to the Tidal Sea

Made of mortal flesh, I am

Yet of Spirit overawed and overflowed