simonhlilly

“Dark as the wolf’s month.”

January was known in the past as “Wolf’s Month”, the time when wolves desperate for food would most likely approach human habitations and attack people.

Here are some January words, somewhat dark, but it is the right time to contemplate the dark: on silent, long nights with the slow cold dawn so distant and forlorn…..

The wolf pictures are derived from Celtic Iron Age coin art.

I

Wolf month.
Feasting faded.
Now, waves of biting wind,
Sharp rain.

Through aching twilight,
Tattered roads.

The bright horizon, a promise
That cannot be kept.

Dreams become shredded, screaming,
Hung from cold tree towers.

Ghosts only,
Stare back from the water’s surface,
Gaunt, well- eyed.

Wolf Month:
Hollow,
Grey
And hungry.

II

Cold and fallow,
Muttering, dry dust.

The need to
Feel a delicate thread
That drives down
Into dream.

Needle-sharp,
Sew swiftly
The images that rise
And flitter.

We are nothing but
A flicker of light and shade-
Dust that sings
Dust that sifts through silence…

Drought
Needs root
To break.

Shock,
Hollow hopelessness,
Jagged entropy of rusty planets,
The tiring, desperate wheeze
Of a starter motor
Failing to…..

Wait.
We cannot always be glorious
We cannot always be beautiful
We cannot always be breathing words out
Into the world.
Wait.
Breathe in.
Feel gravity settle and whispers calm.
Down
through the endless compressed strata.
Dreaming of dragons…..

III

I came across an old Latin palindrome, a verbal construction that reads the same whether read forwards or backwards. Most palindromes are verging on nonsensical, but this one has resonance…

Palindrome.

‘In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.’

“We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire…. ”

That which we see is a reflection:
Invisible axis throwing back
A memory.

Mica dust
Brushing lips and eyelids

A fall into grace,
A desire for answers

A fibrillation of wings
A gesture of antenna

A coagulation of doubt,
A delineation of vagueness

Distant carillons resound-
Cerebellar starlight flickers

Walking forwards
Eyes in the back of the head

Walking backwards
To get a better view

Counterbalance dreams with …what?
with callibration
With certitude
With fumbling dogma

Go backwards-
Find a beginning.

Go forwards-
Find an ending.

Chiaroscuro.
The demon drunk
Gnashed a brush between his teeth,
The tang of turpentine and linseed.
Delighting, near mad, he moulds
Inpenetrable shadows to our godly form.
Heretical, welding us to darkness.
Creatures of form, no longer of light
But extruding from blackness our passions,
Our writhings towards a vague holiness…
Carravaggio, unkindly revealing
Moth nature,
Called to burn in the flame,
Corruscating, veined…

Like Blake’s daemons
We fall through aeons of void
Melting into gravitational chains,
Bound by chattering certainties
Bound by certain fears..

Into the spotlight,
We must enter the spotlight
Significant and justified…
Worthwhile, loved, approved of…

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