It flowers with the breath,
Unfurls like a fern on the hill.
A cuckoo thing from somewhere else,
Desiring to belong, to be heard.
A voice rumbling with thunder,
A hiss of rain, a roar of wave,
A keening of curlew.
Nothing new, though,
nothing new can ever be said.
Before the flocks, before the engines,
Before the need to be somewhere else.
Kite and buzzard wheeled high above here.
On their upward soaring voice,
The voice of moving, warmed airs.
With vision open, fixed on hope,
Their hunger to remain.
Insistent is the voice of a silent land,
Holding those who care, to stand still a while to hear.
From the ground, and from beneath that,
It will rise up in its own time.
An uncurling, a reaching thread,
A line of a melody,
A translucent tusk of language.
In the waters, between field and wood;
In the moments, as cloud shades and passes;
Before certainty and after doubt;
A voice weighs and judges its own worth.
The verses shall all bow down, bright-browed.
Prophecy is the love-child of thought.
Lost souls, reborn, eager to take flight again.
The root of my tongue is locked to a syllable of light.
A spark electric, a leap between precipitous cliffs:
The long darkness of being, the long darkness of non-being.
A slim, swaying golden chain
Rising up to eternity,
Sinking to iron-cold oceans.
It shall not cease til it ceases,
Takes breath, and speaks again:
The whispering of rock and stream and soil.
A mother’s voice, never lost.
simonhlilly 