soundofmanywaters

This poem had to be in sonnet form because it is about the mysterious "Dark Lady" who is said to have inspired some of Shakespeare's Sonnets. For convenience I have printed below four of his Sonnets which I particularly had in mind. Please note I don't imagine for a moment that there is any comparison between my scribblings and the work of the Master! Dark Lady Is that you, peering out between the lines, The fourteen bars he conjured for your cage? He lured you where eternal summer shines And promised to set you free from mortal rage. We know a bit – he swore that you were fair – Your lips, your breasts, the black wires on your head – He told us how he loves your voice, but where Does he record a single word you said? So did he break your bondage to decay? We neither see nor hear you. He’s to blame. One word our greatest wordsmith didn’t say, He didn’t even bother with your name. What strangely lifeless immortality. There’s only one Word speaks eternity.        ...

 On Beauty Since no pulchron has ever blundered  Into our particle detectors or been smashed Up in our accelerators, experts insist She’s been Nietzsche’d into nothingness, like God. But I have made her acquaintance as the host Who shows me round the Garden. She doesn’t say much, but when she finds A momentary fragility Or immutable massivity A sudden twist of melody Or deep resolving harmony Consonants dancing lightly Through a moving ground of vowels - “Ah!” she cries. She shimmers like the water Whose ripples flicker with light’s liquid flame. She is teaching me to turn from the foolish sheep And from my forty years of disappointment And turn to where she stands on holy ground For she is a mighty messenger of awe  Burning but not consumed in living fire. Ah! Let me walk with you across the water Your golden path that leads me to the sun.

  Bearing the image   Still without memory, still unaware Of any possibility of future, there Sprawls Adam in his golden thoughtlessness Upon the green of Eden, where he is   Contemplated. While he continues whole Completeness only incompletes his role. The cut is deep. A trail of scarlet blood Leads to where Eve too slumbers upon sward.   Adam’s wound will close, hers will remain. New life is only birthed in blood and pain. She dreams of a thorned and weaponed future where A cross awaits the offspring she will bear   And now the image opens in her eyes Of Love most fully given when it dies.

 SoundofManyWaters News June 2025 Remarkably, SoundofManyWaters has now received over 3,000 views! Thank you so much everyone for taking the time to look at my poems. I hope you have enjoyed them and found them stimulating and inspiring. Although most of you are from the UK, over a thousand come from the USA, Canada and Singapore, with a large number of other countries also represented. I feel deeply humbled. There are now 40 posts on SoMW, which may make it hard to navigate the blog, find your favourites, or sort out the best poems from the ones that work less well for you. I personally feel disappointed that the posts appear just in date order, leaving some of what I like to think are really good poems way down the list where many potential readers may not look. I hope you will persevere in the belief that there may be gems to be mined deeper down. Two other less than perfect features of the blog are first that the poems appear at first sight as prose. At least one friend of mine...

Held I am a stone chipped from a cold white tomb. In your firm grip I'm comforted and scared, my jagged edges fit wrong in your palm. Both strong and tender, soft and hard, you hold and hold and hold and hold; transformed deep till the pain of being slowly eases, quiet your life seeps in until I'm calmed. But from your hand around my sharpness oozes Redness. You could not grip me without wounds, My name engraved in pain in your pierced hands.

This is a reworking of a poem that appeared earlier on Sound of Many Waters. I've long felt that its last stanza, in which my journey comes to rest under the roots of the oak, belonged in it but was not the place to end it, because I want to share a better hope in these poems.  Spinney When I was a child there was a chestnut. Her candles blazed all May long, giving way To tawny rubies casked in spiky green, Her low-arced branches luring me to climb and to conquer.   Later it was a beech tree I loved best. My auntie had one growing by her gate. Though she had many shapely arms, she called it Venus de Milo for her voluptuous torso And sheeny skin.   Next came a birch, slender silver Barred with elegant black, bronze too at her wrists, yet tough as tundra, And in season a shimmer of shivering, defiant gold.   There were many more saplings for my spinney, Hornbeams and hollies, lissom willows, Doomed tragedies of elm and ash, Eve...