endlessly red on our snow

If the egg is too fresh, then boiled,
it will not peel. If you drop the egg
into boiling water, it may crack.

I cannot tell you in minutes
seconds, beats of phoenix wings,
burning or emerged

or of cicada hearts,

how long your egg will take to set in the centre
or the soft ceramic white. So many things
will be brought to bear upon the outcome:

the pressure of the air beyond the pan,
the diet of the hen, her mood,
the moods of the gods,

whether a witch is whispering
outside your window, whether a black cat
furs your path in the morning

as the unbound yolk of sun
divides dawn clouds.

Whether the stars were pale the night before
or shifting through all the colours. Whether
you watched your body dance amongst the northern lights

like a flame seen through an insect’s wing.
So many things. But you can know,
and this I cannot teach you.

A soldier is lost in a library. Between page and eye
birds are forming from coloured honey.

The soldier thinks there are so many answers, but mine must be
the prettiest. The birds are fountains that swallow themselves.

They are all liars, but they sing well and pretend
they exist and are sane. The soldier juggles with them,

clings to them, entreats them,
wrings them till they spill

ink over continents, thinks
that if they are mad then the world is mad.

The birds shed themselves empty.
The answers are not colours and sweetness, the soldier

is pleading, is pleading, is pleading.

I grew up in a village too;
horses across the road, black and chestnut.
I remember the weight of their galloping bodies
learning me that life could be like hammers on earth,
landslides. My father would tell me

I was the little boy in the old rhyme,
the boy promised the last bag of precious wool.
I was cocooned in it, and I grew.

Now I am trying to thread a nerve
between my life and yours,

but the spark voids to pain. No soldiers
came one morning, with tools

of a craft more ancient refined
than the long records of the dead
through which I am sifting. No soldiers came
to carve their company’s name in my father’s skin
and prise me from the swaddling.

My Lai Massacre

I will learn autumn like a harp,
forage it for soot swelled blackberries
and sweet chestnuts to caramelise;
I will sweep the death colours into sweetness, the reds,
the endless reds that rain past the throats of flowers
who wring their plain grief like widows
as frost tombs the sod, and the shadow hangs like crows.

Agapē: charity, love. Accords our coloured sands. Becomes
the English agape: wide open. Mouth of ocean. These are magic words.
Anemos: wind. The Greek alpha

is spoken like a lover’s hym. Anemone: wind flower:
so called because its petals are easily scattered. Formed when Aphrodite
tended the open wound of Adonis, gouged by jealous Ares. Blood and nectar

became flowers. In Latin, the word becomes
animus: breath, spirit, soul. In English: animate: breath of life.
Sea anemone: stinging petals. Animosity: breath against breath.

There are words that can poison apples:
the prettiest: kallistēi. A nymph, poor Callisto,
raped by Zeus, hated by Hera,

who turned her into a great bear. In remorse, The Cloud Gatherer
gave her to a lovely cage: Ursa Major. Callisto
is a moon of Jupiter. We did not free her.

Magic words weave spirit in ink.
The Greek alpha; close to the open vowel in mars, and art:
both sweet and dark in becoming.

In my mind her peoples’ past holds flooded hollows
graced with rays that part or bend through salt water.
Now is a bubble that rises like a gaze. Thirty years
before my bubble was blown, there was war, and worse.

Today I tell her we are not different;
she tells me our souls are. A cruel covenant?
I see her in Jerusalem: a jewel under dawn’s sun.
Her soul hovers and pulses like amethyst turning.

It is beautiful enough to be true. Or perhaps all she knows
and all I know is memory, on no shore.
This brave old world is too big for stories,
they whisper to each other

like the condemned. They are tired of knowing
and of being birthed into the wide hollow
that love leaves. Yet somehow she shields
their words for this, like fruit, or keys.

Her eye rests in the marble like a galaxy
her son is rolling. A hamster spins its cage.
She shakes pages free of her fingers; Caryatids
and Atlas, elephants on a tortoiseshell
and something like God holds whosoever
wants to be held. Today he is rippling silver
beside some seaside town, she whorls smoke
through the gap, shedding ash. There is no story,
but keep talking love,
keep misting windows and painting your breath
into the clear of glass.

A well-known scientist (some say it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

How strange that one may speak of silence,
tow threads of sugar past thin,

lace this void with the absence
of satin or gliding on snow.

Please imagine these words whispered, or better still
whisper these words to yourself.

You will not be startled
by the joints of your house, when they carp in its sleep,

or by the footfalls of the rain.
If you hear them fade

pass outside to your world
as it casts its words again.

Wordsworthrap