Around me there are light and heatand many people laughing people talking, talking, talking… floods of words unloosed, flowing endlessly not caring what they say or mean… There is music of a kind; and there are many, many games to play within the pale, in these gardens wide and formal, paved and shaved and shaped… Players moving …
Author Archives: Ciel
Tolkien Tribute: Reflection
This is another of my Tolkien-inspired poems, this one reflecting on Frodo after his return from the Ring journey. I see myself reflected in the mirror every day, the very one I looked in before the time I went away. What is this face, this one I see? It looks to be the same old …
Glamour
In the United States, in much of the world that has long followed its lead, life is about surfaces: superficials carried to extremes of glamour like a thick and heavy layer of makeup; makeup that highlights, changes, and masks what lies beneath it. Glamour not only hides reality, it denies it. It seduces and lies …
Sinking
Fathoms down from day and light and warmth… in the haunting intonations of the singing of a whale; the chittering of shrimp; the clatter of a crab against a rocky reach of ocean floor… Allpressured into silence in the deep… There is no question of a voice, my voice, arising up from this dark space, …
A Gathering of Stones…
…of mortar and affectionwarmed by April suna drift of fragrance, cow’s breath and old hay,ripe cheese, pale grassesthe lightest scent of blossom and the lingerance of snow,and breakfast hearth-smoke… Distant crows are wheeling, cawing,coarsely calling admirationof the new-turned turf,of turning season, of turning, turning, turningin the sky above the oaks…The human touch of talkand laughter …
Music of Childhood
I’ve just inherited my father’s record collection, and the slightly archaic device on which to play them–Hurrah! In fact, I was thinking sadly only a couple of weeks back about how much of the music I grew up with–ethnic and folk–simply isn’t played anymore, and that I could only hear, distantly, the echoes remaining in …
Midnight Musing
In the quiet after midnight,then my artistry awakesand in the dark when others sleep, then the fit of writing takesmy hand and mind, and bids me think…It skips and tumbles down the page,leaving in prints of pen-and-inkimages I never thought beforeand thoughts never imagined–They enter through the midnight doorfrom moon- and star-light fashioned.
Other Lives
I would not live foreverin a single suit of clothes.I would not careto memorizeforevereach stain and tearor keep track ofevery button lost. Thankfully, I forgetfrom time to time,the progressand the passageand the passagesthrough which I wend my way… The details ofhard lessons, happily,escape me like the pains of giving birth.It is enough, the thing I …
Tolkien Tribute: Epistle from Gandalf to Galadriel
I have a collection of poems written in tribute to JRR Tolkien over the 50+ years I have considered myself a Middle-earth expat. This one was written for a challenge on a Tolkien-related site Galadriel, I greet thee,a moment stealingfrom my Mannish guise,to speak as one-to-oneto one as old as Iand also wise… Here I …
Continue reading “Tolkien Tribute: Epistle from Gandalf to Galadriel”
Spirit Rises
Struggling, striving,yearning towards the light, our passage isn’t always seenby those in passingeither way. We climb, we pause,we rest…and reach again… And though we dally here and there,or sleep a thousand years, or seem to die,we’re rising, always–Rising to the Light… 1980
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 