SHINING WORLD
(MANANNAN’S ISLE)
Glass-smooth the sea,
Its light a silk knife
Whispering sighed names:
The hidden islands.
Bathed in rainbow words,
There and not there,
Not to be focused upon.
To be rolled upon the tongue,
Tasted and weighed,
Melted to a honey meaning.
Sung in fickle keys
Near impossible to memorise.
A world away, here between breaths.
Suffers none to name it
Nor clothe it in anything
Other than it is.
Unknown by knowing,
Reached by rudderless boat
Through mist to sunlit sands.
Their mouths say one thing,
Their eyes another,
Their hands dance around,
Gestures in hypnotic weave.
Hope is not there,
Nor is it elsewhere.
Those who want shall
Never be satisfied.
To remember perfectly
And to forget perfectly,
And to continue, nonetheless.
That is how to belong there.
From the lands of eternal dreaming
We seem here to vanish continually,
Swept away,
The tides of joy and pain,
Doomed and mortal.
But without time
What can be done?
The perfected go nowhere,
Nothing accomplished.
Sun and moon and stars hold still,
All roads vanish in the mists.
Wordless songs.
We dream of them,
They dream us,
The in and out of breath.
A golden chain,
Link needing link.
We must dance together.
—
simonhlilly 
Lovely use of words.
Gratitudes, Ben.
Stunningly beautiful – verse and image – and the last line is the essence of wisdom.
Thanks, Jazz. This is one of a few pieces attempting to explore the apparent paradoxes of the Celtic Otherworld tales. I am currently considering that the differences between worlds comes down to the experience of (near or absolute) timelessness in one and time in the other. We humans are driven to a frenzy of action by change and mortality, meanwhile the Otherworlds find it difficult to achieve anything because memory ( the recording of temporal change), works differently, if it exists at all. So for human visitors the Otherworlds often seem to be a purgatory of endless repetition, while for vistors to this world, the inconstancy requires them to set extremely precise rules by which they can stay. This is one strand, anyway. It is much more complex than this, but then, that is what poetry is for…..
Thank you for affording us this insight. And yes that is what poetry is for, or one strand at least.