Collection 9: Relating

SoundofManyWaters Collection 9: Relating

Furies and Gorgons, Bone of my Bone, Semaphore

 

 

Furies and Gorgons

 

Blusterless Agamemnon

The wind gone from your sails

Buy a fair breeze

With your daughter’s blood

And get a hurricane

With talons in it.

 

Medusa rises from the abyss

With serpents rising from her hair

Each slithering shape gazing

With the face of the oppressed:

Despised daughters, belittled

Sisters, grieving mothers,

Abandoned widows and

Rejected lovers.

 

Quick, Perseus!

Raise your mirror

before their stares

Strike home into

your stony heart.

 

 

Semaphore

 

Somewhere we lost the knowing of each other

We made an image, stuck it on a shelf.

Now you are left so many lies to smother

And I must labour on to lose myself.

 

Now mountains rise between us, gaunt and high

And no-one knows what we are waiting for.

Who will be first to scale them, you or I,

And signal in a frantic semaphore?

 

 

Bone of my bone

 

In a velvet purse

I keep blood and treasure,

destiny and source –

fear my hips' swagger!

 

You are the pen that skids

lightly on the paper.

I am the book that holds

the word for ever.

 

I am you and not you

both kin and stranger

like lover and like foe

I demand surrender.

 

 

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.