Book of Voices ( This Sky: part 2)
Each cell voicing its own obituary,
Each mitochondrial Neanderthal fire-watching,
Knapped sound, flint words, held, tapped,
A feel for languid, mushroomed word
( so much glory hidden tangled beneath a milk stream
Of holiness, food, fingered, fluvial through substrate,
A healthy holy rot).
All with voice, all with dawning chorus of song.
An evacuation, a cacophany profane, blessed,
A golden urgent urination ( just so),
A mineral-rich, arcing satisfaction, an urge,
Urgent, unguent, a chrism (even), an eventide
And morning of the first day.
Smudged, succumbed, scumbled, it solidifies
And whispers itself out.
Such clarity cannot hold, a boiled ferment bakes dry,
Returns to sleep, mist rises in the valley,
Stars become acceptibly few, named, blink in and out.
The voices turn to their own dreams involuted,
A cochleal murmur suspended,
Slow revolving wrapped sleeping in spider-webbed tranquillity.
Sleep whilst you can, sleep in unity, in slow breathing
Revolved planetary orbits. Sleep pretty and woven.
Eyes lidded now, eyes lidded.
(Words, fragile as insects, scurry iridescent
Into darkness.)
—
simonhlilly 
Rich language, it must be read aloud – the feel, the texture, the sound, all mesh!
Yes, I think so, Robert. It needs to be slowed up by verbalising or it tends to subside into a raving rant ( which it also is). There’s a strange conflict in poetry between the spoken and written, whether it is voiced internally or externally. And then, if externally, how to be performed. Dylan Thomas read his work very fast so that it became music, but was difficult to get all the depth of imagery. The Sixties and Post-punk poets had a particular rhythm that could be most annoying, laboured like the ‘traditional’ folk singer’s adenoidal wail, WITH a strange, loud STRESS, TO say, I, am POEtry….and a curving lilt and fey wist, whistle, wistfulness….
But then there are those whose voice is so boiled together with their words, once heard speaking their own,it is best to remember that sound every time. I think particularly of Sorley MacLean, whose fine Highland pronunciation is the mellow, angry melancholy of his words, and his voice lived whenever I read the pages.