The Language of Exile. {poetry}
{source}
1
Springing from necessity
Words
Become endangered instincts
Heading for extinction.
A voice alone in the world
Words
Become harts pushing forward
From dark woods.
Like sudden sparks set forth,
Words
Splatter upon blank pages
Searching for form
— Encrusted tiara, studded scepter,
Solitaire on golden band —
Or into your hand
Like sapphires falling
From Her grail.
Words
These glittering attempts
Before swallowed
By swells crashing
Splintering
Shattering demolition
Tsunami of the world’s split.
How swift
The race to end antiquity!
How relentless
The erasure of our depths with
Words
Everything is okay
If only. If only.
If only the shallow hours
Can be maintained
By click-click-clicking
Of mice speaking
Cybersqueaks
Billion-ized
Trillion-ized
The touchpad of technoblitz,
Bombed-out shelters of the soul.
Words
Glittering attempts
Lost jewels.
2
Sitting in crowded rooms
Walking through stores
She is not seen.
Speaking across kitchen tables
The others look through her
She does not exist.
Unheard
Human
Invisible
Indivisible.
Every race on earth
Human
Animal
Creatures of the sea
Herd beasts,
The rainbow race of birds,
Plummets into the mad mire
The fire of Love
The same for all.
Virgil said that.
And who is listening?
I said that.
Since the time
Of early exiles
Since the time
Of eternal exile
Since the time of
Alien words spoken
Since the time of
Fire
Love
Falling
Up
Rising
Down
Ad
Infinitum
Ad…
And where does she live?
Regard!
Crouched in the last
Patch of woods
On a bend by the river
On basalt stones.
Drenched by Irish rains,
She hugs a slab of slate.
She tears into the brambles
Her hands bleed from thorns.
She claws into the bog —
Red-roots-dissolution
Black leaves and lost branches
Peat under her nails.
She hails the spirits
That glow from the holly
Entwining the branches
Rubies dripping from ivy —
And ferns waving madly
Intensify senses
Of all that had been
Of all that is now
Of all that can be.
2
I dtir na ndall isri fear na leathshúile.
“In the land of the blind,
The one-eyed man is king.”
File mór na Déise
“With Gaelic Tadhg dead, the Irish muses are silent.”
~ Tadhg Gaeleach Ó’Súilleabháin (1715-95)
3
But let the muses ask,
“Why should a thorn be sharp-pointed?”
Shall we dive from here
Into the broad sky
Toward the western stars?
Shall I take your hand
Old man, and leave with you
When summer bends to the West?
Hear the lament of Sophia
Hag Ceridwen
Hag Beara
Hear the lament of Eve.
Here is the song of her rebirth
Her coming —
The song of all souls becoming.
4
Come, little fawn
Come lap up my tears
The salt will sustain you
Nothing to fear
Come to this flesh
Wrapped around dreaming
Warm touching mine
All to give meaning
I am and you are
From beginning to end
Your song will sustain me
To beginning again.
Stay, little creature
Here’s a ray from my heart
The light will sustain you
As together we start
To embroider the bird
That flew in your home
Each stitch is reflection
On what life has sewn.
5
I am a dead poet stumbling
I am a fish un-multiplied
I am a mongrel mutated
Growling the old to new.
Though I once flew
Easily between worlds
I now wander the world
In old skins.
I slog the sodden floor
Of what was once a forest grove
And ghosts of hawthorn trees
Press the womb of the sky.
As I
Slice the last apple
And bite one starry point at a time
Five times from the last tree
And muses five times
Call from a Mileisian memory:
Did you know my black dove?
Did you taste the acorn?
Have you heard the owl-hoot
Echo through the trees?
Here is the symbolist’s decree —
In those lost times
When the moon dissolved
The buried jaws
Of the old ones
Ireland’s raw wet
Clamped the mists
Into endless rains
Singing
Of suns rolling in
Of stardust belting the heavens
Of a word becoming a world
Of winds winding colors
And scents
Through gardens
Of possibilities.
***
Pamela Preston, a student of Carl Jung, Robert Graves, and the dead poets and philosophers, embarked on a literary, mythological quest in 1992 with a typewriter and a one-way ticket for Paris, France. Based in the French countryside for 20 years, Ms. Preston continues living and writing her personal myth in a world that is losing its agrarian culture and its legends. She adheres to the words of C.G. Jung, “… a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows.” Pamela’s books and mandalas can be found on Marianne Press and Mythic Threads.
***
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