Poetry by David Aldred

Water Lily

Neither reduce me nor impoverish yourself,
Separation, wrought by words, is an illusion.
I’m a mirror so you catch your own reflection,
You are a glass in which I look and see myself.

For you to find your inner self, outside I seem,
And you remind me of the world’s external forms. Corolla tear drops turn to carousels of time.
Subject; object - are but shadows in a dream.

Pure white, unbearable light defies all seeing;
The seven colours of the spectrum guard the truth. Shades never meet rather flow into one another
Every breath we take is shared by every being.

Symbols and syllables dissolve and dissipate, Bewilderment is fruit born of that fateful day
When, lost, misguided, you invented boundaries.
Yet in the entrails of your own profound mistake

Were hints of hidden truths that long alluded you.
But soon this interlude will pass, you will return
As though, almost, we were never parted, but, in Creative darkness, for au revoir mistook adieu.

The Boar’s Lament

The boar laments our common fate.
Pursued, like us, by wells, in trees.
Life, from death’s hidden hunter flees
To rue the lessons learned, too late.

The boar laments our common fate.
The mountain snow bears your imprint
With swerving tusks and eyes of flint
In time’s brief queue, like us, you wait.

The boar laments our common fate.
Dead quarry quenches no desire,
With temper comes consuming fire.
The time is passed, to hesitate.

The innocent, true hearts relate,
Not us, will enter heaven’s gate.
Lament no more, it is too late
Now, to prevent our common fate.

The Banyan Tree

Under dark canopies of leaves
The deer convene.
Among the green singing shadows
A myriad birds gather to roost.
This ever-living stage
Unfolds unending scenes.

Troops of monkeys cling to trunks
Or swing on branches and
From the ancient hollows and the furrows
Ceaseless throngs of insects hum and sing.

Flowers, opening their soft-petalled beauty,
Close by the tree,
Are boldly kissed by honey bees.

What pageants and processions passed this tree
With limbs cascading happiness and
Showering joy in homily,
In celebration of such majesty?

Praise the banyan’s quiet might
And find the strength to reach that silent ocean
Of the inner self, the heart of light!

Halloween

Now the day is spent and the owls are left
With the stars that litter the firmanent.
The mouse is immured, the mole entombed,
The souls of the night inherit their throne
For the dead there’s no sleep, for the living unrest
Fish banished deep in the slow river’s sheath
As the thickening ice, their lairs insulate
And in the fire’s flesh are shadows of bone.

As, entranced by silence, a strange deathly glow
Shrouds the moonlit meadow in a miserable throw.
In the distance a church carves its form in the sky
As the death knell tolls to the mournful wind’s cry.
Inured to the dark, the bats congregate
And a secret choir sings of time and fate.
As the limbs of mad felons to crosses are nailed
In citadels heretics heads are impailed.

The sentinel moon presides over night,
A cauldron that seeths and spits;
She stirs with her cohorts casting her tricks
As they dance in the light of the stars
In sulphurous pitch the troop masquerades
And horror delight conterfeits, when
Dischord seems harmony, brimstone gold
Dust, and Venus is found kissing Mars.

Visions of skulls, ghastly and gaunt
Haunt the steep skies, lonely and lost.
Laughing cynically, hollow bones taunt
Of unending immortal impending unrest.
As water transmutes to ice and frost,
We are beguiled by truth’s cruel disguise.
Far in the mountains a hungry wolf cries,
Each life signs a debt, and death is the cost.

Goblin and ghoul, banshee and djinn
Ride the night’s wings, as mortals sin.
Shadows deepen in the evening’s eclipse,
The bats and their cronies swoop and flit.
As the hood of midnight consigns all to it’s crypt
Among ancient bones a small mouse crept.

The Power of Music

The actors play on still today as once
They did, both here and far, outside, within

The membrane of the skin where memory
And perception in the painter’s stare desire

Consciousness, conspire, inspiring gestures
Wild and soft, dilating, breathing sound. A

Trumpet forms, from white notes, clouds of stars
From blues: oceans, red ones: blasts of blood and fire.

Music’s mysteries move in trembling strings
Of harps or wind horns, making stars explode

And widening eyes, unfurling flowers to fade
As dreams, turn colours into timbres, fearing

Nothing. Not residing anywhere, yet
Ever playful. Present in the pulsing air.

Melodic gestures, clangor, light and shade,
Announcing both, unfold pure patterns of

The earth, in us, and movement of the heart.
The scents of sound and colour declare love.

Halloween II

A pitiless monster boils and fries
His helpless victims for soups and pies.
That innocent smile’s a malevolent grin
As skeletons leer, impossibly thin.
A bog-bound hell-hound is belching fire,
Flesh reeks and crackles in hideous din.
A column of captives in handcuffs of wire
Await their fate’s inescapable coming.

No acorns or seeds, no nourishing snacks,
A rotting log houses a spider in cracks.
In the cold earth stirs the mandrake root
Of human form and menacing look.
The spirits rise as temperatures drop
In the deep midnight the demons cavort
And the crackpot moon is cock-a-hoop
As even good children won’t do as they ought.

Untethered horses of the night leap,
Ghosts and phantoms, red-eyed hounds, shriek,
Choruses of souls, ungodly hosts.
Warlocks conjure nightmares, wicked wands
Of witches stitch the air into knots,
Invisibly entranced.

Each evening’s full of threat and promise, every
Night’s the very first, last - and the final - toll
Breathing quickens - in proportion life shortens.
Who loosed the thief our presence stole?

Across fields cattle pace and complain.
In the prescience of furious gales
A house of burning windows quakes.
Tormented, a condemned soul wails.

The stars are holes of fire, white hot drill tips
Fixing every watching eye fast to the world,
Turning the gaze of creatures to night’s hips.
Souls drown under waves where they’re hurled.